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Originally posted by StellarX
[They abandoned preparation for DEFENSE while scaling up their means for OFFENSE.
...Not NEARLY as much as creating offensive nuclear weapons and conventional forces made it likely to happen.
Why is it so fantastical to believe that countries able to build nuclear weaponry can not build in concrete and alloy materials protective measures to safeguard their populations is very hard for my to understand.
Originally posted by Wembley
That's how deterrence works.
See above.
I recommend McCamley's Secret Cold War Nuclear Bunkers -
www.amazon.co.uk...
- he's very good on the politics, economics and practicalities of shelters.
Civil defence against a few atomic bombs might be feasible, civil defence of London in the face of multiple megaton warheads (they reckoned at least 8 x 1 megaton by 1967) certainly is not.
The evacuation of millions of people from the city as you have suggested would be highly impractical - and wherever they ended up they would be a soft target indeed.
Yes, in theory a nation could pour a vast amount of resource into building shelters for some percentage of the population -
if they happened to be in them at the right time which is quite unlikely.
But you would have to ask what the point of such an action would be and why anyone would undertake it simply to have a slightly less terrible post-apocalypse.
Originally posted by Harlequin
was reading about a test in 1998 - it took 24 hpurs to shut the doors then , and they couldn`t get 20k beds available in the place , hence why it was downgraded to between 10>15,000
but even so - there are shelters for 95% of the population still.
Originally posted by Harlequin
The UK would be largely unihabitble for at least a few years - the sheer level of radiation would put paid to the idea of rebuilding quickly - if you draw a line on the south of london - and another around nortumbria - the bit inbetween *excluding most of wales* would be a `red ` zone , all the industry , military bases and goverment are targets.
think a population after 2 years of medival england to give you an idea.
edit:the biggest advantage russia has is sheer size -
the USA can`t nuke everything , there are large tracts of land with nothing targeted for hundreds of miles - the same cannot be said for the USA or in fact anywhere else (except AUS)
Originally posted by Harlequin
The problem that is faced is the beta decay rate of the medium-lived by-products; those being 90sr , 131I and 137cs to name 3 (argueably the nastiest) , and to counter the uptake of said elements into the plants - lime helps with strontium , but iodine and ceasium have there very own associated problems.
whilst i do concur that 30 days is too short - given the beta decay for most medium-lived products is around 90% after 60 days , after that , time limited operations could begin (cleaning) whether by scrapping or ploughing the effected soil
yes a nuclear war is survivable - BUT , the powers that be have planned for one to go on and on , not like first strike second strike all over - it would go on for days if not weeks - with potentially a city being hit in day 1 , being hit again on day 12;
so yes deep bunkers will help - but at the worst you must plan for an extended underground stay ,
taking with you everything you need to rebuild from the ground up - water plants , electrical plants , all types of food stuff , millions of gallons of diesel etc.
Originally posted by Wembley
[That was my point- it lasts for a few weeks. Then what? Buy some more from abroad?
It could start in minutes, and very nearly did in the 80's.
Deliberately planning to fight a nuclear war would be total insanity. Nobody has even thought about that since Strangelove days.
The underground does not offer that much protection. You're dreaming if you think you can get large number of people into it, or that many would come out alive.
It's not sealed or anything.
Now, in you fantasy world it mighjt all be 200 ft deep with a special air circulation systerm and supplies for hunjdreds of thousands...but that's not reality.
Management Agency (FEMA), the Soviets have built at least 20,000
blast-resistant shelters to protect approximately 15 million people, or
roughly 10 percent of the people in cities of 25,000 or more. The FY 1981
Department of Defense Annual Report to the Congress noted that
"the Soviets will probably continue to emphasize the construction of
urban blast sheltering. If the current pace of construction is continued,
the number of people that can be sheltered will be roughly doubled in
1988." The Soviets apparently plan to evacuate and disperse the general
population to pre-assigned resettlement areas where they will be fed
and either provided with a fallout shelter or put to work building one.
www.tfxib.com...
The vast Soviet network of shelters and command facilities, under construction for four decades, was recently described in detail by Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci.The shelters are designed to house the entire Politburo, the Central Committee, and the key leadership of the Ministryof Defense and the KGB. Some are located hundreds of yards beneath the surface, and are connected by secret subway lines,tunnels, and sophisticated communications systems. "These facilities contradict in steel and concrete Soviet protestations that they share President Reagan's view that nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,"Carlucci said (Ariwna Republic, April 3, 1988). These facilities reveal that they are preparing themselves for just the opposite." The shelters are also protected against chemical warfare agents, and stocked with sufficient supplies to allow the leadership to survive and wage war for months.In contrast, the limited US shelter system begun in the 1950s has mostly been abandoned."To have something comparable, we'd have to have facilities where we could put every governor, mayor, every Cabinet official, and our whole command structure underground with subways running here and there," Carlucci said. "There's just no comparison between the two."
www.physiciansforcivildefense.org...
In the more traditional areas of strategic defense, Soviet military doctrine calls for passive and active defenses to act in conjunction to ensure wartime survival. Physical hardening of military assets to make them more resistant to attack is an important passive defense technique. The USSR has hardened its ICBM silos, launch facilities, and key command and control centers to an unprecedented degree. Much of the current US retaliatory force would be ineffective against these hardened targets.
Soviet leaders and managers at all levels of the government and Communist Party are provided hardened alternate command posts located well away from urban centers - in addition to many deep bunkers and blast shelters in Soviet cities. This comprehensive and redundant system, patterned after a similar system designed for the Soviet Armed Forces, provides more than 1,500 hardened alternate facilities for more than 175,000 key Party and government personnel throughout the USSR. In contrast, the US passive defense effort is far smaller and more limited; it is in no way comparable to the comprehensive Soviet program.
Elaborate plans also have been made for the full mobilization of the national economy in support of the war effort. Reserves of vital materials are maintained, many in hardened underground structures. Redundant industrial facilities are in active production. Industrial and other economic facilities have been equipped with blast shelters for the work force, and detailed procedures have been developed for the relocation of selected production capabilities. By planning for the survival of the essential work force, the Soviets hope to reconstitute vital production programs using those industrial components that could be redirected or salvaged after an attack.
www.fas.org...
But you're faced with much, much worse threats than that. The SS-18 is 20 megatons - and London would get more than one.
But nobody would be. The rich would be long gone; the poor would be refugees. International corporations and capital would do nothing. Few people would be insane enough to keep supporting a government that allowed it to happen.
We're not talking about Stalinist Russia here. Your country would be instantly converted into a radioactive wasteland, a bankrupt state with millions of people needing medical help that did not exist and a large number of traumatised survivors. It would be a third-world country which the great powers (like Brazil) might provide some aid to if you're lucky...
Originally posted by Wembley
Makes no odds. There is a difference between mass fire and firestorm - Nagasaki had mass fires which are described above and the effect is still lethal.
That amount of thermal energy will cause everything to burn, and good-bye city and anyone in it.
This gigantic fire would quickly increase in intensity and in minutes generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212 degrees F). The fire would then burn everywhere at this intensity for three to six hours, producing a lethal environment over a total area of approximately 40 to 65 square miles - an area about 10 to 15 times larger than that incinerated by the 15 kT atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima."
You think they won't be damaged by that sort of blast?
You should read Kurt Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse 5, on the Dresden bombing which he witnessed first-hand. They had 'corpse mines' to retirve the bodies from shelters.
Cities can only be rebuilt if there is some external assistance. After a nuclear war there wonlt be any. You also have a bit of an issue with radiation.
Defending Soviet Russia with it's millions of square miles, large rural population and totalitarian government is one thing. Defending Britain would be another story entirely.
Originally posted by StellarX
You think they won't be damaged by that sort of blast?
You should read Kurt Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse 5, on the Dresden bombing which he witnessed first-hand. They had 'corpse mines' to retirve the bodies from shelters.
I will stick to physics if you don't mind.
Obviously city centers might not be the best place to be and that's why it would make most sense to only keep vital emergency workers at likely aim points.
Cities are not of much functional use in production economy and they are largely the relics of a bygone era where transportation proved to be far more expensive than now. .
Russia is only twice the size of the USA and in terms of arable land it actually has one third less most of which is in European Russian hardly making their situation easier.
Originally posted by Wembley
In that case you will never have any idea what you're dealing with.
It's the human effects that matter, not abstrtact physics, as Vonnegut graphically shows.
The Dr Strangelove approach of writing off a few megadeaths in inhuman and unworkable.
But that's the entire South of England...
...but Britain is largely a service economy, not a production one. There are not many people in production. And London is the heart of the economy. What would be left exactly?
The US has a population density of 29 per square Km; Russia has less than a third of that at 9.
Here in the UK the population density is 246 per square kilometer and a nuclear war would be proportionately far, far more devastating.
Originally posted by zero lift
StellarX, take some time out and read Steve Fox's excellent history of UK Home Defence nuclear attack planning, entitled - 'Struggle For Survival'.
Meticulously researched over the past ten years, it destroys many of the common misconceptions and outright myths which surround the UK Government's Top Secret nuclear war plans.
Its available to be read online for free.
Despite the scale of the devastation Strath thought the country could survive and recommended large scale plans for public shelter and evacuation. The idea of requiring all new buildings to incorporate fall-out shelters was however quickly dismissed on grounds of cost and the problems that would result from older properties not having this protection. Evacuation was however considered and resulted in a plan to evacuate 11½ million people in the “priority classes”, mainly children and their mothers from the cities. The workers were expected to stay behind to ensure that the economy continued although some suggestions were made that this would be unrealistic and there were some ideas that plans could be made for the city workers to leave the towns at night and return in the morning – until presumably they were attacked and destroyed.
www.subbrit.org.uk...
The 1955 Defence White Paper said that a future war would result in a “struggle for survival of the grimmest kind”. This book examines the way in which the government in Britain prepared for that struggle during the Cold War and the work done, often in complete secrecy by the civil and home defence planners at all levels.
You can read Struggle For Survival for free at www.subbrit.org.uk...
zero lift
[edit on 21/10/08 by zero lift]
If the entire South of England is a city center ( which it isn't as a dictionary would reveal) and the Russians wished to treat them in that way they would have had to expend several hundred 550-750 KT warheads on just the South of England.
The US has a population density of 29 per square Km; Russia has less than a third of that at 9.
So what?
Originally posted by StellarX
The problem being that you can not deter a attacker with tens of thousand of nuclear weapons with a few hundred
Yes, in theory a nation could pour a vast amount of resource into building shelters for some percentage of the population -
All. Something Switzerland did. Why can't Britain?
Why presume a 'out of the blue' strike when such were the most unlikely of scenarios?
Originally posted by StellarX
Originally posted by zero lift
StellarX, take some time out and read Steve Fox's excellent history of UK Home Defence nuclear attack planning, entitled - 'Struggle For Survival'.
And with such a title we can obviously expect him to be a problem solver writing as he was back in 1955.
Nothing has obviously changed since then and even the 1960's the Warsaw pact would have had to use every and any warhead on the United States, not Britain.
Meticulously researched over the past ten years, it destroys many of the common misconceptions and outright myths which surround the UK Government's Top Secret nuclear war plans.
Its available to be read online for free.
Wasn' hard to find and he admits freely that even the Strath report indicated that measures could be taken to survive and continue to fight the war.
The 1955 Defence White Paper said that a future war would result in a “struggle for survival of the grimmest kind”. This book examines the way in which the government in Britain prepared for that struggle during the Cold War and the work done, often in complete secrecy by the civil and home defence planners at all levels.
Oh so they did prepare? Why did the government think they could survive intact? Funny how there is always enough money to save a few tens of thousands who aren't smart or willing enough to make survival for the vast majority a possibility?
You can read Struggle For Survival for free at www.subbrit.org.uk...
zero lift
[edit on 21/10/08 by zero lift]
Read three chapters and skimmed a few more.
To say that i have seen all this before would be giving the writer too much credit for originality. Just about ever misbegotten misrepresentation imagined is peddled here so as to best discourage preparing the necessary defenses. Again all your doing is attempting to defend the notion that war is unimaginable ( as is ever next world war) despite the fact that we keep fighting them with clear winners and losers. I don't think this will change no matter how much devastation results short of blowing the planet to smithereens in which case the struggle will continue on the Moon and or Mars.
I have so far avoided discussing all the active defense measures that can be taken but since people such as yourself wish to insist that every weapon launched will reach it's target it may be just about time to start dispelling that myth. Maybe if only a few explodes you would take a less defeatist attitude towards all of this?
Stellar
Originally posted by Wembley
You keep evading my original question about how much a 20 MT warhead on London would do. And the indications are that there would be a lot more warheads than that airmed at Southern England
So your claim above about Russia only having half the populartiond ensity of the US is wrong.
Originally posted by Wembley
Why not? The point of MAD is that once you pass a cerain level, it doesn;t make any difference how many the other guy has.
Well -
1) Economics - Switzerland is richer and spends less ond efence
2) Culture - the Swiss have a long tradition of civil defence; you can't create it out of the blue
3) Geology (a lot of British homes are built on flood plains - no cellars!)
Because the point of a first strike is that it should arrive out of the blue.
As for nuclear accidents that could have resulted in launches, several could have resulted in an apocalypse with a few minutes warning -
www.pbs.org...
Originally posted by fritz
*snip*
Incidentaly, those of you expousing theories about where it would be safe to live in the UK following a Nuclear attack, then I have some very bad news for you.
According to Biological tests conducted by the RAF during to early 60's [during which aircraft were flown up and down the east coast of the UK,
spraying harmless vectors] and given the prevailling winds blowing across the UK, the safest place to live after an attack would be the Outer Hebrides, Mull and Islay, not to mention Anglesey and Snowdonia.
[edit on 23-10-2008 by fritz]