Nuclear war: Cause, outcome, survivability

[Nemmerle]

Originally Posted by USMA2010

The president, or the acting president, is the only person who has access the nuclear launch codes of the United States. Some guy in Montana can't just let fly with his ICBMs because someone said some SS-25s are coming.

There are two types of codes involved in the launching of a nuclear weapon from an American silo. There's an authentication code which accompanies a fire order (really it would be calls an Emergency Action Message) to the silo to verify that the order to fire is actually from the right person and then there are activation codes which the staff of the silo usually retrieve from a safe which are used to physically unlock the weapon.
Neither of these is exclusive to the president - indeed the president would not have the codes to physically unlock the weapons, simply the codes to verify his orders.

[MrFancypants]

The problem is that if you throw a nuke at military capabilities you will end up destroying a lot of cities. Look at Russia, you can't disable their ability to wage war without destroying their large industrial cities.

Many nuclear weapons seem to be designed to take out population-centers (Russian or Chinese ICBMs are not that accurate, or so I heard). Also, if the enemy has some nukes left (which will probably be the case as there are mobile weapons on trains, trucks, submarines and planes) they probably won't be used to destroy empty rocket-silos but rather command&control facilities as well as the capital of the attacking country.

[Gauntlet]

Originally Posted by MrFancypants

Many nuclear weapons seem to be designed to take out population-centers (Russian or Chinese ICBMs are not that accurate, or so I heard). Also, if the enemy has some nukes left (which will probably be the case as there are mobile weapons on trains, trucks, submarines and planes) they probably won't be used to destroy empty rocket-silos but rather command&control facilities as well as the capital of the attacking country.

Chinese missiles wouldn't be too accurate since they are relativly new to the ICBM weapons.

Russia on the other hand is getting along fine with its newer missile types. The small and generally accurate SS-25 SICKLE (Topol) and SS-27 (Topol-M) is considered to be among the best ICBMs in the Russian missile forces due to their high chance of retaliation since they can be launched from virtually anywhere, including silos, railways and fieldbases.

The Topol-M also have a naval SLBM relative called the SS-N-30 (Bulava) which will be fired from its 2-3 remaining Typhoon class SSBNs, as well as the Borey class which is still being built (2 submarines).

The SS-24 SCALPEL and the SS-18 SATAN is still good missiles, with a decent accuracy as well as yield. The SATAN is pretty old, but they have constantly updated them so that they are enjoying more accuracy than the first versions. The SCALPEL and SATAN are both silobased missiles, but I belive the former can be fired from special modificated railways.

Mini-lecture on the basis of the Ruskies missiles is hearby over!

[Zero111]

I don't think Russia is a major worry to the United States, besides their poor security of their nukes. China is a more...threatening, threat. They have nukes too.

[Ensign Riles]

The human population is too high, the the world too large to wipe us out as a species. We would survive, but there would be no economy and probably take decades if not centuries to recover if a full blown war were to break out.

[Chris]

I fully agree with Riles. Survivable, but not economical.

[Admiral Donutz]

Well it's not much of an opinion more of a fact. We could survive due to our numbers and global spread. Some people *should* survive, or atleast there would be a good chanche of them suceeding.