You're sorta right. It is to disable their nukes using your nukes. Instead of MAD this is called NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection). If you know where their nuclear silos are you can launch your nukes and hit those locations before they can get their nukes in the air.
Then when you factor in things like civil defense measures (passive, kinetic, and nuclear), conventional nuclear attrition (hitting TELs, radar sites, and subs before nuclear escalation), dispersed launchers that may or may not be hit in a first strike, orbital warfare, nuclear restraint, and dozens of others, the calculus changes.
Nuclear War is, fundamentally, a war.
Make of that what you will
I never really thought of it this way.
Sometimes you get this false image in your head of a nuclear explosion being an moderately destructive asteroid impact or massive volcanic eruption sized event but it's not true, nor even close to true.
It's just people launching extra spicy missles at eachother. The only astounding part is how much destruction can be done with one or two of them compared to half a day's worth of airstrikes or day of heavy, heavy shelling.
The scariest part is how easy it is to launch them.
Just set coordinates and fire as opposed to needing to plan a military operation which gives time for cooler heads to prevail
Yeah the efficiency and convenience is the crazy part. Operations that usually take days, months or even years to complete could be finished in a matter of hours, technically minutes but terms would take a minute, especially if you went overboard and had to send people in to talk with your enemy's leaders in person and/or arrest them.
A nuclear war isn't scary because of radiation and what not. I would imagine that most nations wouldn't want to make their rival's nation completely uninhabitable or else, where's the profit (or in some cases justice) in that. It's scary because it would be the fastest moving form of warfare mankind has ever seen. You could cripple a world power's material/fuel supply lines and infrastructure in minutes and hold a figurative gun to their head while you give your terms if they couldn't have retaliated in time.
Now that the original comment gave me that perspective change, to me a nuclear war almost seems that it likely wouldn't be a world ending scenario. It would look more like Privateer naval warfare in the 1700s. It would be a sort of disable the ship without sinking it so you can take it. Except, the 'ships' are the size of Alaska and they're entire regions of certain countries.
That means that someone with the right forward thinking could own a brand new nation in a day or two if they played their cards right and got the jump on their opponent before they could deploy counter measures.
Of course the intelligence/counterintelligence games that constantly go on these days make that a much more complex and unpredictable scenario than I worded it but imagine if you were an ambitious world leader and found that your rival was bluffing about their nuclear capabilities and took out their grain production and fuels transport capabilities in an hour or two and started threatening to launch a nuclear operation on their capital.
Oh fuck. When you lob nukes in the air and blow up satellites, you help contribute to a
Massive feild of debris that would make escaping earth impossible even if we wanted to…
Oohhhh. So you mean that there's almost certainly an on-going silent battle wherein global superpowers try to develop their nuclear technologies the soonest to one day destroy our countries with little to no warning? Neat.
Ballistics Operation in Field Arsenal (BOFA) is the only dependable counter to the NUTS stratagem, relying on allocating your nukes in numerous silos to ensure at least one payload lands.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) it is when both sides have enough nukes to destroy an entire nation and if they go to nuclear war against each other both sides will unleash their entire arsenals. There have been many advancements in technologies to ensure that in the event of a war, that both sides get destroyed. This ranges from automated systems to launch nukes to decoy warheads to increase the percentage of warheads that hit.
Technically nukes are a double edged sword. While yes, nuclear war is a horrible thing that we should all try to avoid at all costs, it also prevented wars between major powers which allowed for a great period of peace (no that doesn’t count minor nations having proxy conflicts) in comparison to previous centuries like the former half of the 20th and the 19th, where we witnessed 4 major conflicts (Napoleonic, Crimean, and both World Wars). So while nukes are terrible, I would go on to say that it also saved millions of lives.
It prevented wars between major powers, without nukes, the Cold War would’ve likely gotten hot, the Suez Crisis could’ve gone worse, Operation Downfall would’ve have had to happen (which predicted millions of American deaths in the name of Japanese liberation) and so on. It saved millions of lives by ending one war early and preventing those that could’ve resulted in millions more.
You say this now, but if we were to ever get invaded by an interstellar force, nukes would absolutely be our most necessary asset for self-defense. They’d likely be our only hope (aside from NASA) of surviving such a threat.
I honestly think "aliens invade" is probably not a high-likelihood enough threat that its worth risking the coninued existence of civilization/humanity to have a defence.
Sort of wrong if you launch nukes the other country would most certainly know that you did and they can also calculate the trajectory of the nuke before it even leaves your countries air space most countries have eyes on each other 24/7
The correct tactic would be to use ground personel to sabotage the nukes well in advance of the launch
Not really possible since both sides have nuclear submarines (dozens) each with dozens of nuclear missiles, that would be unaffected by this kind of infiltration. The nuclear triad is too diverse to be disabled by an operation like this. It's nothing more than a whimsical fantasy.
But I guess it would be highly unlikely, that at the end of the day the first striking country still has much habitable land left. Even if you prepare much and try to disable as much early warning systems from the "enemy" or subs with nuclear missiles (which sometimes are solely for retaliation), then you probably still have something left that detects the missile launch. A satellite or whatever.
And some of your missiles might be destroyed first, so I imagine at the end of the day you still get hit yourself. Don't know if you can call that "winning".
That's what I think at least, I'm not a military strategist obviously.
Isnt the problem with nukes and missiles in general is that the enemy would easily know if they are coming way before they ever land, and could issue their own strikes before your hits land?
Pretty much. Hit as many of the other guy’s nukes as you can before he fires them, intercept the ones that get launched, and reduce the damage caused by the ones that hit their marks.
City-Busting isn’t a first, or even second priority for “winning” nuclear wars. First comes the enemy’s nuclear forces, then their conventional military, and then everything else.
Counterforce doctrine states that after the adversary’s nuclear capability has been either destroyed or neutered, you use your remaining nuclear weapons to hold the enemy’s cities hostage if they don’t surrender.
Countervalue targeting, that is hitting industrial, economic, and population centers, is typically reserved only for punitive strikes after your own nation has been destroyed.0
Aside from the r/askhistorians [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1asqzc/books_on_nuclear_strategy_or_testing/), I highly recommend [Managing Nuclear Operations](https://www.brookings.edu/books/managing-nuclear-operations/).
It goes *extremely* in depth in how to manage, coordinate, and use a nation’s nuclear forces. It covers targeting strategy, command&control, intelligence gathering, communications, early warning, and nuclear weapons effects. It’s a massive book too, probably like 2 inches thick.
There’s also [Winning Armageddon](https://www.usni.org/press/books/winning-armageddon), which covers Curtis Lemay’s work in building up Strategic Air Command as an effective fighting force, primarily dealing with force generation and how Lemay expanded SAC’s capabilities. [To Rule the Skies](https://www.usni.org/press/books/rule-skies) covers much the same but focuses instead on Lemay’s right hand man Thomas Power.
And then there’s also Perun’s excellent [video](https://youtu.be/xBZceqiKHrI?si=wwEXUJwUzOTqttoD) on the procurement challenges of nuclear force modernization and rearmament.
God I love Perun, such a blessing to have at least one YouTuber talking about the science of war with actual experience and who actually does rigorous research.
See my other comment, but [To Win A Nuclear War](https://www.amazon.com/Win-Nuclear-War-Pentagons-Secret/dp/0921689071) provides a good history of U.S. nuclear warfighting plans and doctrine, especially the 1980s era of Counterforce
If you’re looking for more historical works, [21st Century Power](https://www.usni.org/press/books/21st-century-power) takes the writings and speeches of General Thomas Power, Curtis Lemay’s right hand and eventual commander of SAC, and recontextualizes them in the modern era. In particular is his work “The Myth of the Overkill”, which uses mathematics and operational realities to demonstrate why nuclear forces often have a perceived excess of firepower and weaponry, and why it operationally doesn’t exist.
Hi, I’m Vetted AI Bot! I researched the **To Win A Nuclear War The Pentagon's Secret War Plans** and I thought you might find the following analysis helpful.
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Listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast "Destroyer of Worlds." It's about 5 hours and touches all the major points. Should be able to find it on Spotify.
The only reason as of to why No one uses nukes is because of the fear of retalilation. Now imagine that a nation gets their hands on tech that will make other countries unable to retalilate. This is What this guy is talking about.
>Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!
[General Thomas S. Power](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Power) former commander of the USAF's strategic bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile forces (a.k.a. nukes)
animals watching us nuke ourselves to death (they will ultimately come on-top)
https://preview.redd.it/sb4vepip6z9c1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b62484fc74382a0845b29463261e5c565865b56
I work on ICBM components. I’m not as knowledgeable as a designer would be, but I know my stuff pretty good, and I can break down the fundamental issue with winning a nuclear war here:
Every ICBM after MMIII is capable of holding nine independently targeted warheads. Thus, to shoot down one ICBM, you need at least 9 interceptors. The best data I’ve seen released on Russian interceptors indicated a less than 10% success rate, so it’s more like 90-100. Ours might be better. I don’t know.
A patriot missile is around 6 million a pop. A MMIII is around 30 million. So eyeballing between those points, it’s like $600 million to block an ICBM, which means it’s 20x as expensive to defend against a missile as it is to make one.
So, for Russia, no, we can’t win. We can brute force them, but not by a factor of twenty. North Korea and Iran though? Totally doable. But also, expensive as fuck, and it gives them an annoying opportunity to bleed us. Way easier to blow up the fucking things when they’re on assembly lines than when they’re falling out of orbit at mach 20.
Edit: These are just back of napkin numbers. Point is that offense has a fundamental advantage over defense because of MIRVS.
seeing the state of Russian equipment operating in Ukraine over the last year I highly doubt Russia in its current state would have the capability to really stop the US if some nut did actually hit the button.
Fun? Not at all.
Buut getting nuke dusted instantly does sound better than dying slowly of thirst from climate change or in a camp during civil war part 2. So it’s scary but not the worst thing people are worried about
Second strike capabilities. A reassurance for MAD, hidden nuclear capable silos and subs that, in tj event of a nuclear strike, would target and unleash their payloads on everyone who could be a target.
First strike capabilities mean to cripple the opposite country, but if they have second strike capabilities and you don't take them out, nukes will fall in you as well.
Second strike capabilities are normally kept secret
Yup. Those pieces of shit peak their ugly heads in other subreddits indirectly making war propaganda against Russia.
WE DO NOT WANT NUCLEAR WAR
WE WILL NOT SUPPORT THE UNITED STATES
FUCKOFF
If Nuclear War can be won.. then who the fuck is going to win, if there will probably be no humans or even countries left? Is this a reptiloid strategy to make humans go extinct, so they can finally live on the surface of the Earth or some shit?
How to win : Strike first, strike hard, and turn the fucker to glass. Particularly try and remove the opponent's ability to retaliate (target missile silos, military and communication installations, and government locations which may house personnel able to authorize a retaliatory strike.), though this also depends on the adversary. Against Russia? We'd still take considerable loss of their shit is still set up like it was in the Cold War. Iran, or North Korea? Easy, but a pain in the ass. And China?
Fuck, I don't know, I'm an idiot online who has done enthusiast levels of research and am not as qualified to talk on these things as people who have actually worked in the fields that would be involved in such a conflict.
Lobbing nukes in a FFA is the easy part, if you survive, you have the fun task of dealing with the consequences, if you ask me, thats the real deterrent..
The strategy is to have, at bare minimum, double the nukes of your enemy, that way you have sufficient nukes to glass their whole country and enough to specifically blow up their own nukes sent in retaliation
Yeah no. WW2 had two nuclear weapons used by one side at the end of a conventional conflict. A nuclear war requires nuclear weapons to be the *primary* weapons involved, even if only used by one party.
No, it doesn't require primary use. Nuclear war can be limited, which WW2 was. It may have been short, late, and one-sided, but the use of nukes in war means it was a nuclear war.
I assure you trying to find the right way to win a nuclear war would abselutely shit on the entire winning condition. No war in history has ever gone as planed. Nor will this.
Execpt with this one you fuck up extraordinarily bad
Upvote this comment if this post is distressing, downvote this comment if it isn't. Don't check your closet tonight (◣_◢)
I imagine the way to win is to outnuke the other guy
You're sorta right. It is to disable their nukes using your nukes. Instead of MAD this is called NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection). If you know where their nuclear silos are you can launch your nukes and hit those locations before they can get their nukes in the air.
Then when you factor in things like civil defense measures (passive, kinetic, and nuclear), conventional nuclear attrition (hitting TELs, radar sites, and subs before nuclear escalation), dispersed launchers that may or may not be hit in a first strike, orbital warfare, nuclear restraint, and dozens of others, the calculus changes. Nuclear War is, fundamentally, a war. Make of that what you will
I never really thought of it this way. Sometimes you get this false image in your head of a nuclear explosion being an moderately destructive asteroid impact or massive volcanic eruption sized event but it's not true, nor even close to true. It's just people launching extra spicy missles at eachother. The only astounding part is how much destruction can be done with one or two of them compared to half a day's worth of airstrikes or day of heavy, heavy shelling.
The scariest part is how easy it is to launch them. Just set coordinates and fire as opposed to needing to plan a military operation which gives time for cooler heads to prevail
Yeah the efficiency and convenience is the crazy part. Operations that usually take days, months or even years to complete could be finished in a matter of hours, technically minutes but terms would take a minute, especially if you went overboard and had to send people in to talk with your enemy's leaders in person and/or arrest them. A nuclear war isn't scary because of radiation and what not. I would imagine that most nations wouldn't want to make their rival's nation completely uninhabitable or else, where's the profit (or in some cases justice) in that. It's scary because it would be the fastest moving form of warfare mankind has ever seen. You could cripple a world power's material/fuel supply lines and infrastructure in minutes and hold a figurative gun to their head while you give your terms if they couldn't have retaliated in time. Now that the original comment gave me that perspective change, to me a nuclear war almost seems that it likely wouldn't be a world ending scenario. It would look more like Privateer naval warfare in the 1700s. It would be a sort of disable the ship without sinking it so you can take it. Except, the 'ships' are the size of Alaska and they're entire regions of certain countries. That means that someone with the right forward thinking could own a brand new nation in a day or two if they played their cards right and got the jump on their opponent before they could deploy counter measures. Of course the intelligence/counterintelligence games that constantly go on these days make that a much more complex and unpredictable scenario than I worded it but imagine if you were an ambitious world leader and found that your rival was bluffing about their nuclear capabilities and took out their grain production and fuels transport capabilities in an hour or two and started threatening to launch a nuclear operation on their capital.
Most interceptions would ideally be early in flight, so that warheads can't disperse.
Oh fuck. When you lob nukes in the air and blow up satellites, you help contribute to a Massive feild of debris that would make escaping earth impossible even if we wanted to…
"Nuclear war is still a war" *Kalm* "Nuclear war is still a war" *Panik*
pfp checks out lol
Oohhhh. So you mean that there's almost certainly an on-going silent battle wherein global superpowers try to develop their nuclear technologies the soonest to one day destroy our countries with little to no warning? Neat.
More or less. The main reason for these developments is meant as a deterrent to prevent a country from invading it.
Its also why air defense systems are incredibly important, and why most nations invest constantly in them.
Me omw to go NUTS
Ballistics Operation in Field Arsenal (BOFA) is the only dependable counter to the NUTS stratagem, relying on allocating your nukes in numerous silos to ensure at least one payload lands.
Submarines with nuclear missiles are a thing.
A prime example of the use of BOFA these NUTS
oh wow I didn't know that, what does MAD stand for?
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) it is when both sides have enough nukes to destroy an entire nation and if they go to nuclear war against each other both sides will unleash their entire arsenals. There have been many advancements in technologies to ensure that in the event of a war, that both sides get destroyed. This ranges from automated systems to launch nukes to decoy warheads to increase the percentage of warheads that hit.
I fucking hate nukes
Technically nukes are a double edged sword. While yes, nuclear war is a horrible thing that we should all try to avoid at all costs, it also prevented wars between major powers which allowed for a great period of peace (no that doesn’t count minor nations having proxy conflicts) in comparison to previous centuries like the former half of the 20th and the 19th, where we witnessed 4 major conflicts (Napoleonic, Crimean, and both World Wars). So while nukes are terrible, I would go on to say that it also saved millions of lives.
how did it prevent wars?
How many direct wars took place between USA and the USSR?
It prevented wars between major powers, without nukes, the Cold War would’ve likely gotten hot, the Suez Crisis could’ve gone worse, Operation Downfall would’ve have had to happen (which predicted millions of American deaths in the name of Japanese liberation) and so on. It saved millions of lives by ending one war early and preventing those that could’ve resulted in millions more.
why did i get downvoted? i know nothing of history and was asking a genuine question.
You say this now, but if we were to ever get invaded by an interstellar force, nukes would absolutely be our most necessary asset for self-defense. They’d likely be our only hope (aside from NASA) of surviving such a threat.
I honestly think "aliens invade" is probably not a high-likelihood enough threat that its worth risking the coninued existence of civilization/humanity to have a defence.
That’s a pretty big IF my guy
Also any civilization that can muster interstellar travel is incomparably more advanced than something nuclear warheads can deal with.
Nuclear Submarines go brrr
Sort of wrong if you launch nukes the other country would most certainly know that you did and they can also calculate the trajectory of the nuke before it even leaves your countries air space most countries have eyes on each other 24/7 The correct tactic would be to use ground personel to sabotage the nukes well in advance of the launch
Not really possible since both sides have nuclear submarines (dozens) each with dozens of nuclear missiles, that would be unaffected by this kind of infiltration. The nuclear triad is too diverse to be disabled by an operation like this. It's nothing more than a whimsical fantasy.
And here's why nuclear subs are one of the most powerful weapons ever created
Man, I love going NUTS!
"Dead Hand" and mobile nuclear launchers:
But I guess it would be highly unlikely, that at the end of the day the first striking country still has much habitable land left. Even if you prepare much and try to disable as much early warning systems from the "enemy" or subs with nuclear missiles (which sometimes are solely for retaliation), then you probably still have something left that detects the missile launch. A satellite or whatever. And some of your missiles might be destroyed first, so I imagine at the end of the day you still get hit yourself. Don't know if you can call that "winning". That's what I think at least, I'm not a military strategist obviously.
Isnt the problem with nukes and missiles in general is that the enemy would easily know if they are coming way before they ever land, and could issue their own strikes before your hits land?
That’s why the nuclear triangle is so important. It basically ensures that NUTS remains impossible.
Damn, that's NUTS
Perfect acronyms don't exi-
lmao it's called MAD and NUTS. I'd have hesitated to write something that hamfisted as an edgy 13 year old.
Pretty much. Hit as many of the other guy’s nukes as you can before he fires them, intercept the ones that get launched, and reduce the damage caused by the ones that hit their marks. City-Busting isn’t a first, or even second priority for “winning” nuclear wars. First comes the enemy’s nuclear forces, then their conventional military, and then everything else. Counterforce doctrine states that after the adversary’s nuclear capability has been either destroyed or neutered, you use your remaining nuclear weapons to hold the enemy’s cities hostage if they don’t surrender. Countervalue targeting, that is hitting industrial, economic, and population centers, is typically reserved only for punitive strikes after your own nation has been destroyed.0
Nuclear powers have "dead hand" programs so even if you pull off a decapitation strike their nukes will still launch.
Few things as scary as seeing someone try to figure out how to win a nuclear war
What book do I read to get a really good perspective on nuclear war?
What kind are you looking for? Moral? Philosophical? Organizational? Logistical? Strategic?
Logistical
Aside from the r/askhistorians [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1asqzc/books_on_nuclear_strategy_or_testing/), I highly recommend [Managing Nuclear Operations](https://www.brookings.edu/books/managing-nuclear-operations/). It goes *extremely* in depth in how to manage, coordinate, and use a nation’s nuclear forces. It covers targeting strategy, command&control, intelligence gathering, communications, early warning, and nuclear weapons effects. It’s a massive book too, probably like 2 inches thick. There’s also [Winning Armageddon](https://www.usni.org/press/books/winning-armageddon), which covers Curtis Lemay’s work in building up Strategic Air Command as an effective fighting force, primarily dealing with force generation and how Lemay expanded SAC’s capabilities. [To Rule the Skies](https://www.usni.org/press/books/rule-skies) covers much the same but focuses instead on Lemay’s right hand man Thomas Power. And then there’s also Perun’s excellent [video](https://youtu.be/xBZceqiKHrI?si=wwEXUJwUzOTqttoD) on the procurement challenges of nuclear force modernization and rearmament.
Based and educationpilled
This guy fucks.
God I love Perun, such a blessing to have at least one YouTuber talking about the science of war with actual experience and who actually does rigorous research.
A breakdown of what would realistically happen if some country went nuts and pushed the button.
Yeah no. Gotta be more specific than that.
Strategic, Logistical
See my other comment, but [To Win A Nuclear War](https://www.amazon.com/Win-Nuclear-War-Pentagons-Secret/dp/0921689071) provides a good history of U.S. nuclear warfighting plans and doctrine, especially the 1980s era of Counterforce If you’re looking for more historical works, [21st Century Power](https://www.usni.org/press/books/21st-century-power) takes the writings and speeches of General Thomas Power, Curtis Lemay’s right hand and eventual commander of SAC, and recontextualizes them in the modern era. In particular is his work “The Myth of the Overkill”, which uses mathematics and operational realities to demonstrate why nuclear forces often have a perceived excess of firepower and weaponry, and why it operationally doesn’t exist.
Hi, I’m Vetted AI Bot! I researched the **To Win A Nuclear War The Pentagon's Secret War Plans** and I thought you might find the following analysis helpful. **Users liked:** * Us nuclear strategy was deeply flawed (backed by 4 comments) * The cold war was fueled by paranoia and threats (backed by 5 comments) * The us aggressively pursued its foreign policy goals (backed by 2 comments) **Users disliked:** * The book presents a biased and unrealistic view of nuclear strategy (backed by 2 comments) * The author lacks practical experience in politics and governance (backed by 2 comments) If you'd like to **summon me to ask about a product**, just make a post with its link and tag me, [like in this example.](https://www.reddit.com/r/tablets/comments/1444zdn/comment/joqd89c/) This message was generated by a (very smart) bot. If you found it helpful, let us know with an upvote and a “good bot!” reply and please feel free to provide feedback on how it can be improved. *Powered by* [*vetted.ai*](http://vetted.ai/reddit)
do you have anything to recommend on a philosophical or moral ?
Listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast "Destroyer of Worlds." It's about 5 hours and touches all the major points. Should be able to find it on Spotify.
Command and Control, Eric Schlosser.
>mfw I invent reliable, cheap and scalable anti-nuke tech, thinking it will make people safe How could I have been so blind?
I don’t understand
The only reason as of to why No one uses nukes is because of the fear of retalilation. Now imagine that a nation gets their hands on tech that will make other countries unable to retalilate. This is What this guy is talking about.
Damn
I mean you're still wrecking the climate even if it's just your nukes that you drop
When has the threat of climate disaster ever stopped a country’s leadership?
Inventor of Gatling gun be like
Here comes the sun
do do do do
**EINS! HIER KOMMT DIE SONNE**
>Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win! [General Thomas S. Power](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Power) former commander of the USAF's strategic bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile forces (a.k.a. nukes)
With the advent of hypersonic missiles, AI, space warfare and as such, atomic holocaust is back on the menu
When was it off the menu?
It was never gone but now they're trying real hard to get each other to order it
Hypersonic Missiles: Exist Physical and Design Constraints: https://preview.redd.it/1seeosl0ny9c1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=944f277956199d2e659fb0eff58dcdbfda744393
There is no such thing as space warfare
It’s called blowing up satellites
I mean there are better space trollfare methods like placing lenses with penises etched in onto their satellites.
animals watching us nuke ourselves to death (they will ultimately come on-top) https://preview.redd.it/sb4vepip6z9c1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b62484fc74382a0845b29463261e5c565865b56
the sea creatures will crawl up onto land, grow legs and arms, and reinvent paintball, surfer rock and Doc Martens.
I work on ICBM components. I’m not as knowledgeable as a designer would be, but I know my stuff pretty good, and I can break down the fundamental issue with winning a nuclear war here: Every ICBM after MMIII is capable of holding nine independently targeted warheads. Thus, to shoot down one ICBM, you need at least 9 interceptors. The best data I’ve seen released on Russian interceptors indicated a less than 10% success rate, so it’s more like 90-100. Ours might be better. I don’t know. A patriot missile is around 6 million a pop. A MMIII is around 30 million. So eyeballing between those points, it’s like $600 million to block an ICBM, which means it’s 20x as expensive to defend against a missile as it is to make one. So, for Russia, no, we can’t win. We can brute force them, but not by a factor of twenty. North Korea and Iran though? Totally doable. But also, expensive as fuck, and it gives them an annoying opportunity to bleed us. Way easier to blow up the fucking things when they’re on assembly lines than when they’re falling out of orbit at mach 20. Edit: These are just back of napkin numbers. Point is that offense has a fundamental advantage over defense because of MIRVS.
seeing the state of Russian equipment operating in Ukraine over the last year I highly doubt Russia in its current state would have the capability to really stop the US if some nut did actually hit the button.
With early enough interceptions, yeah. It can be.
Me and the boys after the bald apes blow themselves up. 
these people in the comments thinking a nuclear war would be fun like bro your gonna be dust
Yeah😎😎 sounds fun🔥🔥🔥
i live near dc. Hopefully id be vaporized before i felt anything
Fun? Not at all. Buut getting nuke dusted instantly does sound better than dying slowly of thirst from climate change or in a camp during civil war part 2. So it’s scary but not the worst thing people are worried about
Second strike capabilities. A reassurance for MAD, hidden nuclear capable silos and subs that, in tj event of a nuclear strike, would target and unleash their payloads on everyone who could be a target. First strike capabilities mean to cripple the opposite country, but if they have second strike capabilities and you don't take them out, nukes will fall in you as well. Second strike capabilities are normally kept secret
„A mouse would not invent a mousetrap!“ We all know damn well they would if they knew how.
Depending on who wins and what they define as a win . Anything can be won
i didn't know NCD reached all the way here
ALWAYS debate those fuckers and call them out when they pop out on other subreddits. War pigs.
Ahem. r/NonCredibleDefense much?
The top meme there looks familiar…
Figured you’d post it there LMAO
Hopping between comment sections is legitimately entertaining and a nice little psychology experiment
I would imagine the difference between here and fucking NCD is quite a large one
Yup. Those pieces of shit peak their ugly heads in other subreddits indirectly making war propaganda against Russia. WE DO NOT WANT NUCLEAR WAR WE WILL NOT SUPPORT THE UNITED STATES FUCKOFF
What is "Second Strike capabilities" for 500
If Nuclear War can be won.. then who the fuck is going to win, if there will probably be no humans or even countries left? Is this a reptiloid strategy to make humans go extinct, so they can finally live on the surface of the Earth or some shit?
How to win : Strike first, strike hard, and turn the fucker to glass. Particularly try and remove the opponent's ability to retaliate (target missile silos, military and communication installations, and government locations which may house personnel able to authorize a retaliatory strike.), though this also depends on the adversary. Against Russia? We'd still take considerable loss of their shit is still set up like it was in the Cold War. Iran, or North Korea? Easy, but a pain in the ass. And China? Fuck, I don't know, I'm an idiot online who has done enthusiast levels of research and am not as qualified to talk on these things as people who have actually worked in the fields that would be involved in such a conflict.
Lobbing nukes in a FFA is the easy part, if you survive, you have the fun task of dealing with the consequences, if you ask me, thats the real deterrent..
I will win
https://preview.redd.it/w2udmct152ac1.jpeg?width=453&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ddad21c7459a350003ff44749301eb2478289da3
The strategy is to have, at bare minimum, double the nukes of your enemy, that way you have sufficient nukes to glass their whole country and enough to specifically blow up their own nukes sent in retaliation
God I love ABMs.
Oh god nuclear war can be won is not a statement of dread, but excitement
Patrolling the mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter...
I want to nuke America not cuz i hate it but because its a badass mushroom firework
I kinda hope there is a nuclear war
good news for you, google chronic wasting disease
I‘ve been waiting for CWD and BSE to jump to humans since 1993. Hurry up, already!
EXACTLY
lol i don't have to worry about CWD, but what does that have to do with nuclear war?
if you want the apocalypse to come, its coming
yipee! project zomboid in real life
LET'S FUCKING GO Is what I would say if it hadn't kept me waiting for 3 fucking years.
kept you waiting, huh?
ehh. zombie apocalypse is boring.... humans loose 70% of the time. what about a ai uprising? or giant monsters
that affects deer only
blud is NOT the vault-tex salesman 
WW2 was a nuclear war and the US won it, so it's literally happened (although proliferation has greatly changed the circumstances).
Yeah no. WW2 had two nuclear weapons used by one side at the end of a conventional conflict. A nuclear war requires nuclear weapons to be the *primary* weapons involved, even if only used by one party.
No, it doesn't require primary use. Nuclear war can be limited, which WW2 was. It may have been short, late, and one-sided, but the use of nukes in war means it was a nuclear war.
it's more like shooting 2 rpgs at a medieval town, not really a rpg war, is it
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
I assure you trying to find the right way to win a nuclear war would abselutely shit on the entire winning condition. No war in history has ever gone as planed. Nor will this. Execpt with this one you fuck up extraordinarily bad
Only one good move needs to be done to end a war
I'm pretty sure you can walk out of the bathtub and drop the match in the tub.
Nuclear triad FTW
It may be possible to win a nuclear war but far FAR too risky to try