3 ms·
Not if the silo can withstand a direct hit from anything short of a nuclear bomb going off nearby. ICBMs aren't that precise- or they didn't used to be- and tha
by roywiggins 2y ago
Not if the silo can withstand a direct hit from anything short of a nuclear bomb going off nearby. ICBMs aren't that precise- or they didn't used to be- and that's why you'd compensate for that with nuclear warheads. Or, alternatively, early ICBMs would have seemed nearly pointless to develop before nuclear weapons existed to put on them.
If a superfuze or a super-IMU means that you can kill one silo with one nuke, that is a huge improvement over the old status quo, where it was assumed to take several, simply because the CEP was larger than the radius at which they can destroy a silo.
If someone does have an conventional ICBM that can reliably take out nuclear silos that would be an even bigger deal.
Of course the US military has been working on conventionally-armed ICBMs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_Prompt_Strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_Prompt_Strike
- littlestymaar 2y ago> Not if the silo can withstand a direct hit from anything short of a nuclear bomb going off nearby But this kind of silos simply doesn't exist. Yes you could theoretically imagine such a silo, but because the threat of a conventional bunker buster payload hasn't been very realistic when it comes to nuclear silos, they aren't designed to deal with such a thread and instead focus on protection against the kind of overpressure that is caused by an nuclear explosion occurring around.