Apollo, inspired by the KIROV and SS-N-19 antiship missile?

namelessfly wrote:

BobG wrote:Ah... What counter to nuclear weapons have we had for the last 60-odd years? Other than MAD, and I don't think that is a counter.

-- Bob G

The best countermeasure to nuclear weapons is the simple shovel.

With a shovel, a couple of doors and a few hours warning, you can build a simple trench shelter that will protect you from nuclear fallout, direct nuclear radiation and thermal radiation which can be the biggest killers.

With somewhat more sophisticated tools, railroad ties and more dirt, you can build a shelter very similar to a shelter that survived even though it was only 100 yards from ground zero at Hiroshima.

With a trackhoe and a moderately sophisticated steel fabrication shop, you can build a shelter similar in design to a underground fuel storage tank that will allow you to survive the detonation of a one megaton nuke 1/2 mile away. Large diameter concrete sewer pipe works well too.

Earth penetrating nukes with accurate guidance are effective against hardened bunkers. I offer the Pershing 2 missile as an example.

However; against a shelter that is more than two crater radi plus penetration depth deep, it is useless as long as the shelter is seld contained and has multiple exits.


The permormance of Israel's iron dome nukes the idea that antimissile systems are futile. Granted that a 1 km/s rag head rocket is easier to intercept than a 7 km/s ICBM RV, you can afford to build multiple, multimillion dollar interceptors to intercept the nuke.

We don't have a counter to nuclear weapons only because a bunch of imbeciles decided that MAD was the Holy Grail of deterrence. MAD men do stupid things such as accept Vladimir Putin's demand that we cancel the ABM radar in Poland and depend on Russia to provide us with early warning of an Iranian missile launch.

In this instance, I have to agree with Nameless about MAD. At the time it was initially proposed, it might have made sense. These days, it persists for (I think) three main (and very bad) reasons:

(1) It's been around so long that it has acquired the patina of "Everyone Knows" which is the reason most obsolete strategic concepts linger long past their "use-by" date.

(2) Some scientists (who shall remain nameless; no double entendre intended) publically endorsed the "nuclear winter" scenario/specter/bugaboo long after the assumptions and numbers which produced it had been debunked as highly questionable, at best. Their reasoning was that any nuclear war/use of nuclear weapons would be so terrible that any argument (be it ever so false) which would tend to prevent it from ever happening was valid even if its scientific basis was a crock. In a similar vein, some (I would argue many) of the present day proponents MAD believe that by creating a situation in which everyone believes that no system capable of stopping an incoming nuke can ever be built, we will create a situation in which no nuke will ever be fired in anger, since the absence of such a system does, in fact, create a situation in which all the warheads would get through. In this sense, for at least some of them to whom I have spoken, this extends the "shield" of MAD to minor powers, as well, since even a handful of, say, Iranian nukes inbound would be enough to dissuade even, say, the United States from resorting to the nuclear option in a future confrontation. To my mind, it's sort of like a hostage-taker holding a gun to his own head to hold an armed robber at bay, but people do come up with some peculiar notions on occasion. Sometimes they even work.

(3) Cost. Investing in a solid ABM system would be expensive as hell. Iron Dome works by engaging only the incoming missiles tracking says are likely to hit something important and/or kill people. A system designed to stop a massive, simultaneously launched, time-on-target nuclear missile attack would have to engage a lot more targets in a much shorter window, and it would have to have a very high probability of doing just that (successfully) before it could be considered an effective strategic defense. Some of the MAD proponents to whom I have spoken also invoke the expense argument as a moral argument against building an effective strategic defense. The logic goes that since only wealthy nations could afford them, it would leave poor nations exposed to far greater relative risk. This not only leaves them more threatened by their own neighbors but also makes them more vulnerable to nuclear coercion from someone who does have such a system.

There's probably some point (not necessarily a good ope) to the argument that an effective SDI would destabilize the balance of power (such as it is and what there is of it) by making the nation which possesses it much less vulnerable and therefore more likely to run the risk of a nuclear exchange to get what it wants on the international stage. In effect, that it would take us back to the (fleeting) point in time in which the US had a monopoly on atomic weapons. [sarcasm mode on] Given the wild abandon with which we employed them on all and sundry during that period, this is obviously an excellent argument. [sarcasm mode off] Frankly, I'd be a lot more concerned by the possibility of someone like Putin or our good friend in North Korea getting his hands on one than I would about the US, Great Britain, or France, but that's just my opinion.

As for the survivability of a nuclear war, that's something we're not supposed to talk about. Don't get me wrong --- I think any substantial nuclear exchange would be pretty damned cataclysmic, and the damage it would almost certainly inflict on the population and economic infrastructure of the countries involved would be terrible. I rather doubt, however, that it would be a lot more terrible than what Germany managed to do to itself during the religious wars of the 17th Century. It is part of our current mindset to discuss strategy as if any nuclear war would be an extinction-level event, and that's just plain silly. Casualty estimates for a nuclear exchange are a lot more nebulous than most laymen ever even suspect, and it isn't, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective), something on which we have a great deal of empirical evidence. What we have are stacks and stacks of simulations and projections based on the only two atomic attacks in history and modeling for more powerful weapons, and models are only as good as their underlying assumptions. Again, a part of the reason for this is the deliberate, systematic (and not necessarily a bad thing) programming of public opinion to regard any nuclear exchange as a planetary kiss of death (or the next best thing to it) in order to dissuade anyone from ever supporting a nuclear attack. My only problems with it are that (1) I don't believe in false arguments, no matter how "noble" the end they purport to serve and (2) if the day ever comes that the programmers discover that the current crop of politicians is as capable of lemming-like behavior as Europe 100 years ago this month, the arguments against building any sort of SDI are going to mean that an awful lot of people are likely to die when they didn't have to. A system that successfully protects just LA and Chicago from nuclear obliteration would be worth every penny spent on it, after all.

Please don't use racial slurs.

namelessfly wrote:...rag head rocket...

When you are launching rockets intentionally into civilian population centers with the avowed intention of inflicting maximum civilian casualties, I will refer to you as a rag head or some other derogatory name whatever your race, ethnicity or religion.

The good news is that the deterrent effect of the Israeli response combined with the callousness with which the terrorists used Palestinians as human shields has inspired some introspection about their support for terrorists.

Donnachaidh wrote:Please don't use racial slurs.

namelessfly wrote:...rag head rocket...

namelessfly wrote:When you are launching rockets intentionally into civilian population centers with the avowed intention of inflicting maximum civilian casualties, I will refer to you as a rag head or some other derogatory name whatever your race, ethnicity or religion.

That is kind of like saying "I only use the N word to refer to certain types of black people." There are plenty of derogatory names that you can use that do not denegrate entire societies.

If you want to be accurate as well as dismissive, you could go with something like "muj," short for mujahedin or "those who struggle," from the same root as jihad. I think their struggle is with basic intelligence. See? I have insulted the people I wanted to insult and not the 70% of the culture who don't support them or the 15% who are actively against them.

They are more or less militant Wesbro Babtists. You wouldn't want somebody grouping you in with them, would you?

Thank you for the response. It is obvious that you have given some rather careful consideration to the nuclear war issue.


One aspect of the Honor Harrington universe that interests me is that Weber's descriptions of the synergistic effects of the various antimissile systems and passive defenses resemble how defensive systems a multilayered missile defense system would function and how passive defenses (sidewalls and armor analogous to bomb shelters) could augment the effectiveness of active defenses. Few of the people who argued against SDI had ever crunched the numbers on weapons effects verses the area of urban centers to calculate how many weapons would actually be needed to destroy the major urban areas and kill the inhabitants. IIRC my calculations correctly, it turns out that an attacker would need to deliver about 500, megaton yield weapons to as many different target atlas to destroy the 100 largest urban areas with a total population of about 50 million. If you put people in reasonably robust shelters, then the lethal area of the weapons is reduced by about 95% so an attacker would need to hit 10,000
target areas with as many weapons. Suddently, the overkill is gone.

Another aspect that the critics of SDI got wrong was failure to understand random distribution of missile intercepts. The common calculation was 10,000 missiles against a 99% effective missile defense that would result in 100 missiles getting through to destroy 100 cities. Aside from the misunderstanding about weapons effects and the improbability of not reserving most missiles for military targets such as missile silos, the attacker can't predict in advance which missiles will get intercepted. Even if they aim 100 missiles at each city, the probability that none of the missiles will reach any particular city will be about 37%. Some cities will get nuked only once while others will get nuked multiple times. The result is that about 1/3 of the major urban areas would not be damaged.

Of course a 99% effective missile defense seems improbable. However; if you factor in a boost phase intercept system, a midcourse intercept system and a terminal intercept that are only 2/3 effective, then you get an overall effectiveness of about 96%! A robust civil defense using the shelters that I described forces an attacker to employ surface bursts if they want to destroy bunkers. This has the effect of of limiting the area affected by thermal radiation, nuclear radiation and intermediate level overpressure. Even more importantly, forcing an attacker to use low altitude or surface bursts enables a defender to employ close in weapons systems such as the 30mm Goalkeeper Gatling gun.

IMHO, we are soon going to suffer a limited nuclear strike that will not destroy the US but make us regret not having defenses.

runsforcelery wrote:

namelessfly wrote:
The best countermeasure to nuclear weapons is the simple shovel.

With a shovel, a couple of doors and a few hours warning, you can build a simple trench shelter that will protect you from nuclear fallout, direct nuclear radiation and thermal radiation which can be the biggest killers.

With somewhat more sophisticated tools, railroad ties and more dirt, you can build a shelter very similar to a shelter that survived even though it was only 100 yards from ground zero at Hiroshima.

With a trackhoe and a moderately sophisticated steel fabrication shop, you can build a shelter similar in design to a underground fuel storage tank that will allow you to survive the detonation of a one megaton nuke 1/2 mile away. Large diameter concrete sewer pipe works well too.

Earth penetrating nukes with accurate guidance are effective against hardened bunkers. I offer the Pershing 2 missile as an example.

However; against a shelter that is more than two crater radi plus penetration depth deep, it is useless as long as the shelter is seld contained and has multiple exits.


The permormance of Israel's iron dome nukes the idea that antimissile systems are futile. Granted that a 1 km/s rag head rocket is easier to intercept than a 7 km/s ICBM RV, you can afford to build multiple, multimillion dollar interceptors to intercept the nuke.

We don't have a counter to nuclear weapons only because a bunch of imbeciles decided that MAD was the Holy Grail of deterrence. MAD men do stupid things such as accept Vladimir Putin's demand that we cancel the ABM radar in Poland and depend on Russia to provide us with early warning of an Iranian missile launch.

In this instance, I have to agree with Nameless about MAD. At the time it was initially proposed, it might have made sense. These days, it persists for (I think) three main (and very bad) reasons:

(1) It's been around so long that it has acquired the patina of "Everyone Knows" which is the reason most obsolete strategic concepts linger long past their "use-by" date.

(2) Some scientists (who shall remain nameless; no double entendre intended) publically endorsed the "nuclear winter" scenario/specter/bugaboo long after the assumptions and numbers which produced it had been debunked as highly questionable, at best. Their reasoning was that any nuclear war/use of nuclear weapons would be so terrible that any argument (be it ever so false) which would tend to prevent it from ever happening was valid even if its scientific basis was a crock. In a similar vein, some (I would argue many) of the present day proponents MAD believe that by creating a situation in which everyone believes that no system capable of stopping an incoming nuke can ever be built, we will create a situation in which no nuke will ever be fired in anger, since the absence of such a system does, in fact, create a situation in which all the warheads would get through. In this sense, for at least some of them to whom I have spoken, this extends the "shield" of MAD to minor powers, as well, since even a handful of, say, Iranian nukes inbound would be enough to dissuade even, say, the United States from resorting to the nuclear option in a future confrontation. To my mind, it's sort of like a hostage-taker holding a gun to his own head to hold an armed robber at bay, but people do come up with some peculiar notions on occasion. Sometimes they even work.

(3) Cost. Investing in a solid ABM system would be expensive as hell. Iron Dome works by engaging only the incoming missiles tracking says are likely to hit something important and/or kill people. A system designed to stop a massive, simultaneously launched, time-on-target nuclear missile attack would have to engage a lot more targets in a much shorter window, and it would have to have a very high probability of doing just that (successfully) before it could be considered an effective strategic defense. Some of the MAD proponents to whom I have spoken also invoke the expense argument as a moral argument against building an effective strategic defense. The logic goes that since only wealthy nations could afford them, it would leave poor nations exposed to far greater relative risk. This not only leaves them more threatened by their own neighbors but also makes them more vulnerable to nuclear coercion from someone who does have such a system.

There's probably some point (not necessarily a good ope) to the argument that an effective SDI would destabilize the balance of power (such as it is and what there is of it) by making the nation which possesses it much less vulnerable and therefore more likely to run the risk of a nuclear exchange to get what it wants on the international stage. In effect, that it would take us back to the (fleeting) point in time in which the US had a monopoly on atomic weapons. [sarcasm mode on] Given the wild abandon with which we employed them on all and sundry during that period, this is obviously an excellent argument. [sarcasm mode off] Frankly, I'd be a lot more concerned by the possibility of someone like Putin or our good friend in North Korea getting his hands on one than I would about the US, Great Britain, or France, but that's just my opinion.

As for the survivability of a nuclear war, that's something we're not supposed to talk about. Don't get me wrong --- I think any substantial nuclear exchange would be pretty damned cataclysmic, and the damage it would almost certainly inflict on the population and economic infrastructure of the countries involved would be terrible. I rather doubt, however, that it would be a lot more terrible than what Germany managed to do to itself during the religious wars of the 17th Century. It is part of our current mindset to discuss strategy as if any nuclear war would be an extinction-level event, and that's just plain silly. Casualty estimates for a nuclear exchange are a lot more nebulous than most laymen ever even suspect, and it isn't, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective), something on which we have a great deal of empirical evidence. What we have are stacks and stacks of simulations and projections based on the only two atomic attacks in history and modeling for more powerful weapons, and models are only as good as their underlying assumptions. Again, a part of the reason for this is the deliberate, systematic (and not necessarily a bad thing) programming of public opinion to regard any nuclear exchange as a planetary kiss of death (or the next best thing to it) in order to dissuade anyone from ever supporting a nuclear attack. My only problems with it are that (1) I don't believe in false arguments, no matter how "noble" the end they purport to serve and (2) if the day ever comes that the programmers discover that the current crop of politicians is as capable of lemming-like behavior as Europe 100 years ago this month, the arguments against building any sort of SDI are going to mean that an awful lot of people are likely to die when they didn't have to. A system that successfully protects just LA and Chicago from nuclear obliteration would be worth every penny spent on it, after all.

namelessfly wrote:When you are launching rockets intentionally into civilian population centers with the avowed intention of inflicting maximum civilian casualties, I will refer to you as a rag head or some other derogatory name whatever your race, ethnicity or religion.

You can do that in your personal conversations elsewhere. You cannot do it here on the forums.

A good point.

I confess that my use of certain adjectives for certain groups of people is largely a reaction to the many people on this forum who engage in exactly that type of bigotry in regards to Christains and conservatives.

crewdude48 wrote:

namelessfly wrote:When you are launching rockets intentionally into civilian population centers with the avowed intention of inflicting maximum civilian casualties, I will refer to you as a rag head or some other derogatory name whatever your race, ethnicity or religion.

That is kind of like saying "I only use the N word to refer to certain types of black people." There are plenty of derogatory names that you can use that do not denegrate entire societies.

If you want to be accurate as well as dismissive, you could go with something like "muj," short for mujahedin or "those who struggle," from the same root as jihad. I think their struggle is with basic intelligence. See? I have insulted the people I wanted to insult and not the 70% of the culture who don't support them or the 15% who are actively against them.

They are more or less militant Wesbro Babtists. You wouldn't want somebody grouping you in with them, would you?

To be realistic, most places that could see nukes used are more likely to have been suitcase nukes anyway.

It's entirely possible I've missed it but I don't recall people on this forum using slurs against Christians or conservatives.

namelessfly wrote:A good point.

I confess that my use of certain adjectives for certain groups of people is largely a reaction to the many people on this forum who engage in exactly that type of bigotry in regards to Christains and conservatives.

Wouldn't where the CWIS rounds that miss be a big issue if you were using the CWIS is a populated area? It works for ships because the ocean is really empty so it's easy for it to spot where the friendlies are around it.

namelessfly wrote:[SNIP]
...Even more importantly, forcing an attacker to use low altitude or surface bursts enables a defender to employ close in weapons systems such as the 30mm Goalkeeper Gatling gun.

IMHO, we are soon going to suffer a limited nuclear strike that will not destroy the US but make us regret not having defenses.