The Soviet cold war nuclear missile system was essentially a Doomsday Device. If seismic devices detect the impact of a nuclear weapon inside the soviet union, the
entire system would launch, unless specifically countermanded by the premier (who if already vapourised would never issue the countermand). A simple system to deter pre-emptive strikes, but potentially not immune to error.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

The asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs hit with a force equal to 100 teratons of TNT, and it didn't kill all the life on the planet. A lot of it, yeah, but the planet wasn't scrubbed down to the microbial level either. Plenty of organisms survived. Humans could not possibly equal that with existing technology.

We could maybe destroy ourselves, but I think that even in a worst case senario with a full nuclear exchange, we would set ourselves back a few hundred years at most.

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

With multiple asteroid impacts, we might achieve it.

nuclear war probably wouldn't set us back even that far. Probably no later than 50s to 70s era technology. The ability and liklihood of destroying enough factories to prevent recreating modern technology within a short time frame (a few decades) is probably beyond current weapons inventories. the most critical potential failure would be loss of knowledge, not loss of manufacturing capacity.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

There is a point of diminishing returns on explosive forces. For example a 1GT explosion does not destroy 10 times the area of a 100MT explosion. Basicaly this follows a inverse square law on distance. Actualy, in the atmosphere I think it's even more contrained, but I don't know by how much.

So even if we could develop say, a 100GT Materr/Anti matter bomb, the amount of area affected by it is far less then one would think. Probably about 1/5th of texas in area size.

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There is no problem that cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives - US Army Demolitions School

I just saw Hayley's comet, she waved, Said "why you always running in place? Even the man in the moon disappeared, Somewhere in the stratosphere" - Shinedown

http://worldsofothersuns.home.comcast.net/

I thought it was a cube law, since yield is volumetric, but the impingement of damaging energy is on a plane.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

On the other hand, plans for a first strike nuclear attack, don't just involve one big uber bomb, they involved many weapons.

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Actually, if you plan a first strike, you might only need one. It's the planning for counter-attack that requires more.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

I'd estimate it would be more like between about ten and thirty, as we'll retain all of the knowledge, distributed as it is throughout the world, and we'll retain much of the infrastructure, particularly the tooling.

There is a comment in this interview of a US 100 MegaTon atmospheric bomb test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJixv...eature=related

As noted in this interview the US was very close to nuclear war with the Soviets, three times.

During the Cuban missile crisis, crews sat in nuclear bomber aircrafts on air fields, with armed nuclear bombs, with mission plans to bomb both the Soviets and China.

The crew members were concerned as the bombers must fly at low altitude to avoid detection and then must drop the bombs and execute a steep climb to avoid the blast wave. (The crews knew the steep climb would not protect them.)

The thought was that the US would be weakened after the first strike with the Soviets, so the strike against the Chinese was preemptive.


It was assumed that roughly a 1/3 of the planes would not drop their bombs to avoid certain death from the blast, so all significant targets were allocated two planes.

Incorrect. He's referring to the 100 MT Tsar Bomba, apparently forgetting that 100 MT was only it's design yield. For the test, the Soviets dialed it back to around 50 MT. It could have done 100 MT if the Soviets had wanted to. They didn't.

"Very close" three times - I'll buy that. We were fairly close a significant number more times, usually due to glitches in the system. It was because of those glitches, and fear of unnecessarily starting WWIII, that a rigorous system of checks was put in place to prevent that from happening. In order to maintain the high-speed communications necessary to perform those checks while still responding in rapid order, various communications networks were developed, including Autovon and Autodin, followed by the DSN (Defense Switched Network) and DMS (Defense Message System), which are managed by DISA (formerly, DCA).

Actually, we did that from the late 1940s all the way up until the fall of 1991.

I could tell you the exact date, but then I'd have to kill you...

Wrong. The bombs dropped during low-level were laydowns (parachute), and had timers, allowing the crews to fly, at low-level, out of the danger range before a ground-burst detonation. Bombs dropped from high altitude were similarly retarded, but only enough to stop their forward throw and reduce their descent rate, again allowing the crew to fly beyond the danger range before the air-burst detonation. F-111s and some others had the ability to fly low-level up to a mountain range, pitch up, release the weapon, then get back on the deck heading in a safe direction as the bomb flew, ballistically, over the range and down towards the target, before detonating, safely on the other side of the mountain range from the rapidly retreating bomber.

Even if I knew the overall SIOP plan (I don't) very, very few people ever did, and were sworn to levels of secrecy top enough that if they ever revealed it they'd rot in jail, or worse, for the rest of their natural lives.

Again, wrong. All nuclear bombers from B-36 and beyond carried multiple weapons. It's sort of difficult to strike multiple consecutive targets when the first one takes you out...

Perhaps moral questions would stop certain crews from dropping their payloads?

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

Possibly. They choose people who tend not to do that. If it's a counter-force strike then the target is legitimate, thus less of a moral issue than say, counter-value strikes against cities. Of course, if the enemy just took out half the population of your own country, the moral calculus may have changed. Of course, this may be less of an issue with rockets, the key-turners may not realize the rockets are being launched until they have already launched them.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Read this and this and this. Then tell me what it is that prevents this from occurring.