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They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is conce

They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is concentrated at these locations. It is surely more than 300.

llamaimperative 2y ago
> They aren't targeting cities anymore Citation needed.
- trynumber9 2y ago
  From when the US had 3x as many warheads https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    > We did not have access to the policy documents used by DOD’S war planners or the details of the U.S. strategic nuclear weapons targeting plans. This limited our ability to verify that the process of transforming policy into targeting options functions as described by DOD officials. This document is a description of the targeting process, which existed even when the actual output of that process was "every single city in Russia and China with a population greater than 50,000"
PoignardAzur 2y ago
I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often). You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country. Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on. Quoting from [1]: again: > Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...
- sfn42 2y ago
  On the other hand if you take out every station it takes a lot longer to rebuild than if you just take out one.

llamaimperative 2y ago

> They aren't targeting cities anymore Citation needed.

trynumber9 2y ago
From when the US had 3x as many warheads https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > We did not have access to the policy documents used by DOD’S war planners or the details of the U.S. strategic nuclear weapons targeting plans. This limited our ability to verify that the process of transforming policy into targeting options functions as described by DOD officials. This document is a description of the targeting process, which existed even when the actual output of that process was "every single city in Russia and China with a population greater than 50,000"

PoignardAzur 2y ago

I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often). You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country. Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on. Quoting from [1]: again: > Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...

sfn42 2y ago
On the other hand if you take out every station it takes a lot longer to rebuild than if you just take out one.