One Wrong Decision and Everything Turns to Dust

My dad made weapons as Pantex during the cold war. I remember living in the Panhandle and all its windy glory. The differences in the yields is not just due to accuracy that the USA had from a much earlier time epoch but also the desired SIOP of the force. The USA has always been a counter force strike oriented arsenal. We even developed the first strike Trident system for this. The USA has never been a counter value aka city busting SIOP. It’s simply not our moral standing to build weapons specifically to level cities. America would target ,silos,bases,and leadership bunkers our whole yield structure is designed to that end.

The Soviets and now the Russians have always been a counter value arsenal first because they lacked the accuracy to target the silos individually. The SS18 solves that for them. As they could put three 500+ kiloton warheads on each MM silo with so many to spare if they loaded the SS18 to its 30-50 warhead MIRV potential the 200 meter CEP was then irrelevant.

The Russians still plan to level every city of their adversary. This is clearly why they keep 500-800kt yield on huge icbms that can yeet 30 of them at a time. You get more damage from ten 500kt vs one 5 megaton it’s the same effect as a cluster munition as blast and IR radiation fall off at the fourth power of distance.

The huge 20-50MT warheads are for busting underground leadership bunkers like NORAD. Given that a 20MT surface burst will dig even in solid granite a half mile deep crater you just hit that crater again and again till you dig the mountain out. That is the Soviet way. They also planned on one way trips for the TU95 and TU160 bombers loaded to the gills with gravity 1+ megaton city busters. The USA has not had a functional domestic strategic defense against marauding bombers since the 1960s. Clearly the difference is one nation plans on counter force and the other counter value.

The funny thing about our “precision” guidance systems always seemed a little odd. The “flaw” I see in the systems would seem to make “accuracy” a relative thing as far as how accurate will they be in an actual “war”.

I understand the “inertial guidance” systems rely on onboard equipment, but what if the software or hardware aboard was able to be spoofed or made to malfunction with either hacked or hardware sabotage or hardware Trojans. Sabotage can involve inserting malicious code into a component’s firmware or altering the circuitry of an integrated circuit. It can also involve damaging or destroying physical hardware components.

Then the “ground guidance” systems can be jammed or altered to make accuracy a crap shoot.

then finally to GPS or other externals involving satellite systems.... they will or can be blinded and I doubt would survive the first 10 minutes of a near peer conflict.

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