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It was possible to destroy a city pre-nukes with a dedicated bombing campaign, but it was not possible to destroy a city with a single plane/missile/bomb. Nucl
by ianferrel 4y ago
It was possible to destroy a city pre-nukes with a dedicated bombing campaign, but it was not possible to destroy a city with a single plane/missile/bomb.
Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them.
I think his specific claim is not quite right here, but the thrust of his argument is. There's a reason that nuclear powers dare not enter direct conflict with each other in a way that major military powers used to casually do.
- yamtaddle 4y ago> Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them. I think the key insight here is rate-of-production (measured in, say, tons of TNT equivalent, ready for delivery to a target), ease of stockpiling huge levels of destructive power, and cost of delivering that destructive power. The first two are incredibly higher for nukes vs. conventional weapons, and the last, far lower. 500 late-WWII Allied heavy bombers couldn't wipe out all the major cities in, say, the Soviet Union in a couple days. Impossible. The logistics simply don't work, there's no halfway-plausible scenario in which they could even get close to achieving that, there are tons of obstacles standing in the way. .. with a few hundred nukes, though? Now it's totally possible.