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.
I believe that was actually Che Guevara who said that, and even Castro was appalled, one of the reasons that Fidel didn't shed a tear when Che got his in Bolivia.
McCain was salivating at the prospect, one of the reasons, in spite of Obama, I was glad that McCain never got his filthy hands near the nuclear button.
All of this is predicated on technology the U.S. is widely known to possess.
Although I’m sure there are plenty of our secrets that enemies are aware of, I’m thinking there’s likely several things they are unaware of.
The author is a bit naive. Political winds will shift, and the pendulum will swing away again. Imagine Warren or Bernie Sanders as President. They wouldn't respond without considerable hand wringing. Russia would take out the U.S. without us returning a single missile.
The only place the Russians have nuked have been themselves
Why would missiles from Russia or China even be necessary in such a scenario? Would not an offer of fair treatment, and preservation of position to liberal officials (as proxy servants), along with easy abortion, birth control, and homosexual rights and a (feigned) promise of making Climate Change a priority, be enough to induce surrender at threat of missiles (after a demonstration)?
Likewise the adversaries.
And as long as we’re both more or less in the same state of mind, we’re back where we started at MAD.
It used to be that Washington DC was ‘ground zero’.
Today, it will be the LAST place to get hit.
No enemy with a lick of common sense will want to ‘disturb’ the Congress & Senate we have running this country.
If they get wiped out, qualified people may get appointed.
They don’t need a plan to destroy the country and it’s resources, in a generation or two we will give it to them...
The Ruskie’s have been undermining the USA since the 1930’s. McCarthy called them out in the early 50’s but by that time they were so entrenched that he, rather than them, was destroyed.
They thought, after the Bay of Pigs, pickings were ripe. We had the Cuban missile “crises.” They had to stand down or be annihilated by America’s far superior nuclear force at that time and by those who had served in WW2 still commanding our forces (eg La May and others) and the Ruskies knew we would strike back to any provocation in an instant..
By the end of Vietnam , McNamara, Westmoreland, Kissinger, showed we were a “Paper Tiger” willing to sacrifice 50000 plus lives for nothing.....
Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down this wall but in actuality it would have fell years before but for the Russian agents in the US using it to pursue their agenda.
In 1988 a former CIA chief called Bush was elected POTUS, in 1999 the head of the KBG Federal Security Service named Putin was appointed Russian president and is still there..
Since Putin’s appointment the Ruskie’s have aggressively pursued a plan of world wide dominance which includes active interference in the US elections. (As an aside, I remember before the 2016 election,folks joking here how the Russians would show up at about the same time everyday). The Communists have relentlessly pursued their goals for more than a century.
The United States, on the other hand, has ceded its claim as the beacon of freedom that other nations could aspire to. Instead we have proven ourselves to to be a nation of idiots by electing a Congress of Idiots and a Idiot POTUS who are interested only in Kabuki theater.
That guy always plays his stereo too loud.
-PJ
The Democrats protest that Russian and Chinese war planners only bo.b cities and silos... not the Republican base too. Too bad Democrats because wiping big cities tilt elections favorably to Republicans. Vade, can we pick 12 cities for exchange?
The same half of our population that thinks military people are like servants, and think people are in the military because they are too stupid to do anything else. Mind boggling what that half thinks.
The future is underground.
More life underground than up top
https://www.livescience.com/64272-carbon-mass-in-earth-deep-biosphere.html
“The same half of our population that thinks military people are like servants, and think people are in the military because they are too stupid to do anything else. Mind boggling what that half thinks.”
I don’t think that I ever looked down on our boys in uniform, but even so, when I started working, I could see the HUGE DIFFERENCE in the quality of my co-workers who came out of the military, versus those who didn’t. I just wished everyone could have had that military background (myself included).
I think the Soviets had fat chances to win a big war in between 1972-1986 but at too huge a cost.
Today they aren’t even think about it beyond contingency planning.
As for today no side is capable to prevail.
The thing that worrying is that certain circles in US believe it is winnable at this point and it is a great blunder.
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