Posted on 11/15/2019 2:33:23 PM PST by daniel1212
It's 2025, and Vladimir Putin (yup, he's still in power) wakes up in a historically bad mood. He decides—and everyone around him agrees—that it's time to launch an all-out nuclear assault on the United States.
This is the nightmare scenario laid out in the latest Nuclear Defense Posture Review. It’s also the war envisioned by Putin himself. Last week he took the stage before the Russian Parliament and rattled off a litany of new nuclear weapons to be delivered by silo, submarine, and aircraft—weapons he claimed to be unstoppable....
imagine what Russia’s arsenal could do in a real first strike against the U.S., in a future where Russia's modernization has peaked but the U.S. has not progressed...
Putin’s first strike has two simple aims. One: cripple the United States with a blow that shatters the nation for at least a generation. Two: Keep the U.S. from launching an equally crippling counterattack, immediately or in the future. Getting all U.S. nukes before America has the chance to strike back is not likely, so Putin's goal is to make the exchange of warheads as uneven as possible.
The U.S. Air Force operates infrared satellites in geostationary orbit that scan the globe for telltale plumes of rocket launches...Putin, that rascal, has spent years parking six harmless-looking communications satellites along the same orbital plane...
The Russian sats are motherships. From each, a smaller craft detaches and fire its thrusters and eases toward the launch detection sats. Some have lasers that can dazzle the infrared sensors or burn parts of the satellite, causing the spacecraft to tumble. Other have crude robotic arms that can grapple with the U.S. warning equipment. Others just make a kamikaze run against U.S. targets.
Malfunctions and confused signals from space put the Americans on high alert, but the U.S. is not ready to start a war over dead satellites....
The launch detection sats are just the first line of defense. The U.S has a sophisticated network of high-power radar scanning the skies for missiles. Thule Air Force Base in Greenland has one such radar system...The radar array is specifically watching for Russian missiles. Any sign of them and STRATCOM will know about it and be able to launch ICBMs of their own...
Thule has to be taken out. It’s vulnerable to attack, though an obvious strike would tip Russia’s hand. Putin needs a devastating weapon of sneak attack. And he has one, mounted to the submarine Khabarovsk.
Days earlier, the sub slipped past the Greenland-Iceland-Denmark Gap, a once-formidable NATO screen of sensors and sea/air patrols that guarded against this kind of incursion. The Russian sub carries an external pod with a doomsday weapon: an underwater drone carrying a nuclear warhead. The CIA calls it the “Kaynon.” Russians dub it the Status 6. (This is real tech, by the way. In 2015, during a televised meeting with Putin, media cameras captured images of this weapon in development. It was a set-up, a way for Russia to rattle its saber.)..
The 24-foot drone glides through the shallower entrance to Baffin Bay and dips to a more comfortable depth when it’s able. It's headed for the coastal area just outside Thule...The drone detonates its 40-megaton warhead. The icy shoreline erupts into a towering fireball. The fireball and air pressure wave created by such an enormous explosion wipes the base and its pesky radar off the map...
Putin's sneak attack ensures the U.S. has no way to confirm what's coming next. Putin has already pressed the button on his array of doomsday devices. The 15-minutes between detection and warhead impact has already started...
silos don't move, but weapons have become more precise, a fact that changes the number of warheads needed to hit them.
Putin turns to his new wonder weapon to hit the U.S. nuclear silos before they get orders to launch. There are 25 silos in Russia, each holding what NATO calls the Satan-2 ICBM. The rockets leap out of the silos and drop stages of empty fuel tanks behind them, carrying their payloads toward space. The faring opens and the cargo of each missile is revealed. A YU-74 hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, armed with five nuclear warheads, is a careening to a suborbital altitude atop each ICBM. They separate, and each becomes an independent threat, able to steer its way to a target from unexpected directions...
Putin’s salvo is crossing the North Pole. A radar screen in northern Canada, run by the U.S. and Canadian Air Forces, watches for such an attack. But they're using older radar not optimized to spot the gliding warheads, as an expensive effort to install new tech has been mired in political infighting in both Ottawa and Washington, D.C...
The backbone of the system remains the AN/TPS-77 long range radar, which is great at spotting airplanes that are less than 250 nautical miles away and up to 100,000 feet in the air ` The YU-74 s are zipping along nearly three times as high and have a small radar cross-section...
With 125 glide-delivered warheads on the way, there are enough to strike each U.S. silo in Montana and North Dakota at least once, with warheads to spare to paste a stealth bomber airbase in Missouri, as well as a nuclear bomb and cruise missile stockpile in Louisiana.
At this point, there’s no reason not to let the rest of Russia’s traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles fly.
All this mayhem isn’t enough. The United States' nuclear missile armed submarine fleet has enough firepower to end Russia by itself. For Putin to "win" a nuclear war, the campaign against American subs has to unfold as the warheads are dropping.
The Ohio-class submarines exist because they are hard to spot...By 2025, the Ohio fleet is impressive but aging—and shrinking. Budget cuts have reduced the number of nuke-carrying Ohios to just eight by 2020..
The Russians know about where the submarines will be. Thanks to satellites, spies, and sensors, intelligence agents know which U.S. subs ones are in port and which ones are on patrol...
In the early 1990s, the world's navies realized precision torpedoes were the best way to kill enemy submarines...nuclear depth charges.The idea is simple: When hunting elusive subs, it helps to use a weapon that kills everything in a wide area...
From 60 miles away, Oskar-class submarines can launch N-16 Stallion missiles that drop strings of nuclear warheads into the water. Bombers that take off from Russian airfields near the coast carry warheads set to detonate at various depths and strengths.,,
These warheads cause massive shock waves that reflect off the seafloor. Each time they bounce, the ocean’s surface rises in a column of frothy water hundreds of feet high. The immense pressure beneath the surface crushes submarine hulls...
©2019 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
No way. For Putin to risk surviving our retaliation, he’d need to know our moves for certain, as if he had access to our secrets like through an official’s server kept on a private network for years and........ oh my
How much the US spends versus China and Russia is actually misleading since the procurement costs are much different. How much it would cost China to produce a F-35 (if they could) is much less than here. And while the US still spends more, it is far more spread across the globe.
It assumes Putin goes insane and everyone else around him, as well as those firing the missiles, to either also be insane or just going along with it.
Not saying its impossible. It is practically impossible.
The only other halfway plausible scenario is Putin or their systems are misled/tricked into believing they need to fire theirnweapons.
As per the anti-Christ Communist program.
That doesn’t work as a hypothesis. You can’t live under ground forever. If you have the ability, study the half lives of fission contamination and figure out how to get out of your hole. Then quit watching the SciFi channel.
“That is because Putin doesn’t pay $37 per screw and $640 per toilet seat. lol”
And they also pay their blue collar and white collar defense workers about 30% of what we pay, and probably the same for their (conscripted) troops.
That’s why it’s do damn DANGEROUS to base our national defense on Left Wing talking points.
What a silly article.
“Keep the U.S. from launching an equally crippling counterattack, immediately or in the future.”
Only one of our “Boomer subs” with missiles has the capability to take out Russia as a functional society as they also have the capability to our society. We have many of these subs.
These subs have one mission that is to hide in the deep of the Atlantic, and Pacific and Arctic unseen and undetected. If the sad day happens they are used they will launch hell on the enemy. The enemy will be destroyed with absolute certainty as we in all probability have already been destroyed.
The Russians are not insane thus this will not happen. The Mullahs of Iran are not insane but guided by an insane religion of death and might do this in the future.
Well, the premise was that Putin was not rational, and which thus enabled the scenario to be postulated as tactically plausible, vs. whether it was plausible to occur.
And exploring such scenarios is useful if MAD/nuclear war is to be avoided under the premise that it is suicidal for both adversities. Billions are spend to make sure nuclear war is.
At least 35% of the serfs will be crowding the shores & streets welcoming their comrades with open arms...
The key part of their strategy to be able to hold on to the U.S. is for the U.S. communists get elected (in 2020, 2022, or 2024) with enough control to eliminate troublemakers and confiscate all guns and ammo...
The communist's history of small surrogate wars/revolutions/coups followed by total permanent communist control is well documented...
No way. For Putin to risk surviving our retaliation, he’d need to know our moves for certain, as if he had access to our secrets like through an official’s server kept on a private network for years and........ oh my
“Deep Underground Military Bases. Underground cities connected by mag lev trains. Boring machines that are 100 ft wide. 8 miles of tunnel a day per machine. For the past 70 years our government has built an underground empire impervious to nuclear war.”
Good one!
Russia limits abortion to 12 weeks. Much better than here.
Why bother? Just ask the NYT or WAPO.... Of course, the problem then separating truth from fiction.
That is the long range strategy.
It won’t be Russia in 2025. It’ll be Iran and sooner than that.
The article factored in having just eight Ohio class nuclear-powered submarines by 2020, taken out by nuclear charges.
These subs have one mission that is to hide in the deep of the Atlantic, and Pacific and Arctic unseen and undetected.
Which presumes they are undetected.
But as said, exploring such scenarios is useful if MAD/nuclear war is to be avoided under the premise that it is suicidal for both adversaries. Both sides must see it as rationally unwinnable.
“That is because Putin doesn’t pay $37 per screw and $640 per toilet seat.”
That was simply an accounting trick to hide the expenditures for black budget programs like the B-2 bomber, the F-117, the Aurora, the Navy’s secret (redacted) class nuclear attack submarine, and etc.
“Russia limits abortion to 12 weeks. Much better than here.”
Russian abortions take 12 weeks to conclude? Wow.
And I think you are right on the money with that. :)
But if someone claimed we spend much more than Russia they would be absolutely right.
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