DarthTrader
Diamond Member
- Mar 29, 2022
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- #1
Ok, I dumped about 1,000 hours of study worth of "facts" in the ABM thread, and I don't want to rehash them here because I don't have a conversational context to order them in any meaningful way. I will, however, try to bullet point some things I long time thought about as requisites for actually 'Winning" a nuclear war.
Those things being said helps anchor my thoughts. What I came up with when trying to interpret the Russian ballistic missile defense systems is what I call:
Enclave Systems.
I had this thought after my initial bachelors in strategic studies (nuclear weapons emphasis) and when actually operating as a trained HAZWOPER, that the concept of "hot, warm, cold" zones is backwards for nuclear war. In the traditional NBC hot-zone system, the hot-zone is ground zero, the hottest contaminated zone. But in Nuclear War the most likely outcome is EVERYWHERE will become contaminated to some extent.
So the Enclave System is instead designed to turn that round. The cold zone is at the center and the hot zone is everywhere outside.
The idea is, similar to the Russian system though that is probably by accident knowing them, in that you have very concentrated centers of highly defended hardened facilities that contain everything you need. Power-generation, fuel, food, seed, freshwater, filtration, commodities. Everything.
These huge, concentrated, impossible to destroy sites are your enclaves that form the nucleus of your "cold zone". They could be vast vaults 500+ feet underground or built into bedrock for instance. From here the survivors would have to reclaim the surface. In hazmat operations you create a "corridor" to the hot zone. In the enclave system you create a corridor out of the hot zones.
And this is needed to do a few things. Mainly recontrol of the surface is to get control of strategic assets needed to rebuild your nuclear deterrent.
In war - the end goal must always be to destroy your enemy's ability to make war.
This means uranium mines, access to power, centrifuges, the industry of long-range missile warfare.
Standing armies still matter, whether as special operations to prevent the enemy from doing the same, but more realistically such as new society would become a huge military dictatorship to keep control of the population.
I'll end my thoughts here for now. There's a lot to unpack. But basically - I do think there is a way to "win" a nuclear war. But it's not the ways anyone's traditionally thought of it. It starts with the unanswered questions of what's next after each logical step, to reclaiming the surface and liberating it from irradiated material.
- The Soviet Union and now Russia is more capable of winning a nuclear war.
- This concept is important, Russia has purposefully placed their nuclear forces in such a way that forces the US to respond, thereby minimizing the types of damages to population centers one might expect.
- Russia has massive, massive, deep underground bunkers with years worth of up-to-date supplies for survival, fully operable power supplies etc.
- It's argued some 10million people can be funneled into the Moscow subway system and access these civilian defense bunkers.
- The question I have is why?
- Cobalt-60 is the biggest problem but not the only problem. It is 550 million times more toxic than cyanide.
- How do we clean the surface to reclaim it?
- I'm pretty sure there is a way but I've never developed a strong concept of the engineering scale of the problem.
- Command-and-control has to survive.
- Nuclear deterrence has to survive.
- Conventional military force has to survive.
- ABMs won't work. I detail this at length in the ABM thread.
Those things being said helps anchor my thoughts. What I came up with when trying to interpret the Russian ballistic missile defense systems is what I call:
Enclave Systems.
I had this thought after my initial bachelors in strategic studies (nuclear weapons emphasis) and when actually operating as a trained HAZWOPER, that the concept of "hot, warm, cold" zones is backwards for nuclear war. In the traditional NBC hot-zone system, the hot-zone is ground zero, the hottest contaminated zone. But in Nuclear War the most likely outcome is EVERYWHERE will become contaminated to some extent.
So the Enclave System is instead designed to turn that round. The cold zone is at the center and the hot zone is everywhere outside.
The idea is, similar to the Russian system though that is probably by accident knowing them, in that you have very concentrated centers of highly defended hardened facilities that contain everything you need. Power-generation, fuel, food, seed, freshwater, filtration, commodities. Everything.
These huge, concentrated, impossible to destroy sites are your enclaves that form the nucleus of your "cold zone". They could be vast vaults 500+ feet underground or built into bedrock for instance. From here the survivors would have to reclaim the surface. In hazmat operations you create a "corridor" to the hot zone. In the enclave system you create a corridor out of the hot zones.
And this is needed to do a few things. Mainly recontrol of the surface is to get control of strategic assets needed to rebuild your nuclear deterrent.
In war - the end goal must always be to destroy your enemy's ability to make war.
This means uranium mines, access to power, centrifuges, the industry of long-range missile warfare.
Standing armies still matter, whether as special operations to prevent the enemy from doing the same, but more realistically such as new society would become a huge military dictatorship to keep control of the population.
I'll end my thoughts here for now. There's a lot to unpack. But basically - I do think there is a way to "win" a nuclear war. But it's not the ways anyone's traditionally thought of it. It starts with the unanswered questions of what's next after each logical step, to reclaiming the surface and liberating it from irradiated material.
