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/sci/ - Science & Math

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4056450 No.4056450 [Reply] [Original]

What can a country do to defend itself from nuclear war, assuming that it was inevitable and most of their country will take hits? Is it possible to rebuild your cities to make them more spread apart so that nukes don't do as much damage? Can you house the population below ground instead of above it? How about even moving the whole country into an underground tunnel network?

>> No.4056473
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4056473

This is a highly relevant question in today's politics. Obama has previously toyed with the idea of a North American missile defense system but I believe Congress tore that up sometime following 2010.

But Iran doesn't yet possess the technology for nuclear weapons, and the U.S. navy is surely pervasive and well-funded enough to secure us from ballistic missiles.

>> No.4056475

Sorry to say there is nothing a nation could do.
the enemy will find a way to get the bombs to you no matter how deep you go.

The big question should be "Why would a country start a nuclear war? What do they expect to gain?"

>> No.4056476
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4056476

>> No.4056478

>>4056473

"us" meaning the free world

>> No.4056497

Iran is only after nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
The same reason why Israel will not confirm of deny if it has nuclear weapons

>> No.4056508

Missile interception systems are supposed to be working now.

Assuming no air superiority... no one wants to assume that.

>> No.4056514

>>4056475
But what can you do to minimize the damage or make it as hard as possible for the enemy to inflict damage?

>> No.4056549
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4056549

there is no defense against total nuclear war

the best thing you can do is to chill out and not pushing that button just to get even. If you think something like "whole world, or just half of it... Ahhh fuck it, I don't care anymore!" and push that button then you're a fag.

Cold War was about both sides shitting their pants every night thinking about what if the other side finally lost it and rained warheads upon them. I was raised in the former eastern bloc. Nobody WANTED the war. Everyone was just scared of the guys behind the Berlin Wall to attack first. I think it was the same with the west...

Nukes are wicked things. I seriously hope we'll never use them against each other again.

>> No.4056590

>>4056508
Just pointing out that the missile defense system is designed for a few missiles and not a full on nuclear attack.

>> No.4056766

Yeah, I know nuclear war is bad and there's no way you can survive it. My question is what you can do with your population, industry, and infrastructure in order to minimize the damage that a nuclear bombardment causes.

>> No.4056798

Pretty much what you said. Spread everything out as much as possible, and put as much of everything important underground as possible. The deeper and the more hardened the structures the better. You'll need vast stores of food and supplies to survive underground after a nuclear attack, until the time when the radiation is low enough that people can go back to the surface without much danger. Keep stores of topsoil so that agriculture can be restarted afterwards, because all the fields will be contaminated by radiation.

>> No.4056810

>build your civilization underground and in the mountains
>become dwarves
Just got to watch out for those pesky earth penetrating nukes.

>> No.4056830

we will create great vaults for the chosen few, then we will experiment on them GOD BLESS THE ENCLAVE

>> No.4056841

>>4056810
They'll have to detonate underground, and the ground absorbs most of the blasts force. Now combine that with everything being in hardened structures, and spaced far apart. And if the enemy doesn't know exactly where to aim their weapons (it's kind of hard to figure out where your enemies underground bunkers are from the other side of the planet) it's even harder to inflict damage. And you can build decoys for their surveillance satellites to detect.

>> No.4056852

a significant nuclear exchange would alter weather patterns and drop seasonal temps enough to disrupt food production. I believe scientific american has published several essays on this topic, the latest regarding pakistan.

>> No.4056858
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4056858

Spread out, it's not that fucking complicated. The viability of strategic nuclear warfare hinges entirely on the fact that the vast majority of the population is concentrated in very small regions. Migrating to rural areas and evening out the population distribution would drastically reduce the number of casualties of a nuclear exchange.

>> No.4056862

>>4056852
I thought people don't really believe in that nuclear winter thing anymore.

>> No.4056864

>>4056852
>2011
>Still believing in the myth of nuclear winter
Shame on you.

>> No.4056867

>>4056830
>>4056830

pretty much this; there is no protecting cities from nuke war; even if you could, cities are incredibly fragile things; with the system broken down it would not be able to survive on its own anyway, even if it were spared from direct attack.

keep in mind nukes are now 70 years old. they've probably some greater tools of war by now.

simple answer; get the fuck way out of dodge

>> No.4056878

A First World nation can't defend itself against a nuclear war. It's impossible. 911 alone did $30 billion in damage, and it very much helped send the American economy reeling into a permanent recession. Just one city-sized bomb would cause about a trillion dollars in damage and cause the U.S. government to fail catastrophically, leading to anarchy and Fascism.

The problem with the First World is that it relies heavily on a technical infrastructure that must exist but cannot be made "nuke proof". A nuclear weapon is too destructive; it vaporizes all common matter. And you can't live your life under miles of earth to absorb a strike; in any event, there must be a surface set of exits, and those can be targeted.

Trying to nuke-proof your civilization is about the same balderdash as colonizing the ocean depths. It just can't be done since there's no possible economy that can support it. It would be different if Humans were able to exploit an energy source that was as plentiful and as dense as having a full nuclear power plant for each city block. But that's science fiction; no such energy source exists. Period.

>> No.4056889
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4056889

>>4056878
So first world countries are weak. We should become disciplined centralized totalitarian states with controlled economies.

>> No.4056896

>>4056878
Then why didn't the whole world civilization collapse after WWII? Why is Japan a thriving civilization even after we destroyed pretty much ALL of its cities?
Bull-fucking-shit.

>> No.4056901

>>4056858
> Spread out, it's not that fucking complicated.

Of course it's fucking complicated, you fucking shitbag. You are ALWAYS dependent on supply lines, and the very term "lines" means a CONCENTRATION OF INFRASTRUCTURE. The ports and the pipelines can be nuked.

Spreading out all Americans, in your model, would give rise to such huger energy costs that we'd go bankrupt in a year. Then we'd be defeated without even being nuked.

Which is sort of how bin Laden won, no matter what we did after 911. He won because he got us to further militarize ourselves, which bankrupted us, hence we were automatically defeated.

As usual, the only real defense against terrorism is WIDESPREAD PROSPERITY. The same concept works against crime, too. Prosperous people don't bomb and burglarize. But prosperity is far too expensive for our Jewish masters to allow any further. So pervasive prosperity is over, FOREVER. And that means terrorism and crime are permanent facts of life in the so-called civilized world.

>> No.4056915

>>4056896
Because of a massive influx of economic aid from the US. If America hadn't rebuilt the country after the war it would probably be a a shithole today. If not a third world country, an ex communist state with a failed economy.

>> No.4056926

>>4056901
>>4056901

>terrorism...permanent facts


you seem to have miscalculated

the nature of punctuated equilibrium is that the punctuation is rather short lived. storms don't last 100 days

>jewish masters

how so?

>> No.4056944

>>4056901

>jewish masters


this is just ignorant

economies boom and bust according to well known cycles; you can blame the jews or the banks and there are bad apples in all tribes, and sometimes their influence is allowed to be more pronounced than in other times; however, you and i are responsible for ourselves and our families and our communities

and if you have intelligence, wisdom, courage, etc. then you have nothing to worry about. we're as free as we can afford to be; and others only have as much power over you as you're willing to give them; if you're not buying, does it matter what they're selling?

keep in mind, much of the corporate malfeasance has occurred in traditionally protestant corporations

>> No.4056977

>spread everything out and move everything underground

Sure, if you have cheat codes for infinite resources.

>> No.4056994

>>4056944

You're rather wrong.

Part of the failures of the current economic system is the ability of those at the very top to game the system in an unfair manner. Secondly consumers and borrowers of money were mislead, and in many cases lied to, about what to expect in terms of taking out loans.

If you just want to say, everyone is responsible for the situation they were born into, well, you'd be wrong.

A significant part of the blame for economic shortcomings do belong to the bankers and politicians.

>> No.4057019

>>4056994
>>4056994

>A significant part of the blame for economic shortcomings do belong to the bankers and politicians.

certainly; there's a lot of blame to go around

but most corporate officers, bankers and politicians aren't jews. to isolate one class of people and blame them abdicates ourselves of our own responsibilities. that includes the consumers, who lied about their incomes on these same loan forms, loans that they should have known better to begin with they couldn't afford to repay

from the top to the bottom, many were dishonest, selfish, and ultimately over leveraged

>> No.4057041

>>4056766
Who gives a fuck about minimization? Any large scale nuclear war means we're all dead from starvation in a few years anyway, no matter how you minimize it.

>> No.4057045

up until 2010 there was a requirement in switzerland to build nuclear bomb shelters that have enough space for every single citizen.

>> No.4057061

The most sucessful civilizations will be those that embrace MAD as opposed to those which invest undue time and energy to defending against strikes.

The fact is, the nature of technology is such that for every step taken to defend against a missile strike, the technology to make the missile more deadly and more precise, and better at evading defensive systems takes three steps forward.

As military technology develops there will continue to be a trend that offensive technology exponentially out-develops defensive measures.

Even the best interceptor systems available today can defend 20% of the time only, and this will likely decrease into the future as offensive capabilities continue to be upgraded.

The fact is, it's exponentially more difficult to defend against a missile strike as it is to carry one out, and that will increasingly be the case.

The only option in the future is retaliate on a slightly larger scale than the offender.

>> No.4057065

>>4056450

1. BMD is useless. The best technology today can achieve maybe 1% interception against dummy targets and under ideal conditions. Even if you could intercept a preposterously high percentage of nukes, many would get through.

2. Even detonating as few as fifty 50 kT warheads over cities is enough to partially blot out the Sun for one or two growing seasons, causing a worldwide collapse in agriculture killing about 1 billion people. Ozone layer would also be damage, irradiating everything on the surface. EMP will destroy all unshielded electronics. Even a "small" nuclear war will be devastating, if not civilization-busting.

3. A nuclear winter will not occur if the nukes are primarily detonated in the Northern Hemisphere in winter. However, this means everyone freezing to death as winter sets in and there's no power for heating and no way to procure food.

4. Therefore, in order to house everyone in your country, you have to make like the Swiss and have bomb shelters fucking everywhere. Also, each shelter must have at least a year's supply of food and electricity to ensure that most survive. How much would that cost? It's possible, but very expensive.

>> No.4057095

>>4057061
>>4057061

altho perhaps true, you underestimate the capabilities of the technologies out there now

we have computer controlled lasers in space that can and will shoot out nuke missiles from the sky

we're not going to reveal our best tech until we have no choice; if that means letting a few conventional missiles thru so be it

that said, there are other methods of delivery than the missile, and more powerful weapons than 70 year old nukes

sail to the moon?

>> No.4057264

>>4056889
> So first world countries are weak. We should become disciplined centralized totalitarian states with controlled economies.

The weakest possible troll. Centralization was EXPRESSLY identified as a weakness against nuclear weapons.

>>4056896
> Then why didn't the whole world civilization collapse after WWII? Why is Japan a thriving civilization even after we destroyed pretty much ALL of its cities?
Bull-fucking-shit.

The civilized world DID collapse. That was the fucking WAR, you jackass. It just so happens that there was ONE industrial economy of warmaking size that stayed intact: The USA.

And Japan was razed and was able to recover since we didn't act all MUSLIM on them and wipe them out.

You are totally ignorant about history. Shut the FUCK UP until you actually know something.

>> No.4057296

>>4056450
Invest massively in an anti ballistic missile defense grid with multiple layers based on Earth, Sea, Land and Space, and have civil defense drills constantly.

>> No.4057415

>>4056915
WTF ever.

>> No.4057436

>>4057264
Russia invalidates your opinion.

>> No.4057449

>>4057264
And it wasn't whether it was intact, it's whether it could survive. The truth is, the countries most involved in those wars are ALL doing QUITE well.