How many nuclear warheads does it really take?

Ideally, it takes as many nuclear warheads as necessary to prevent the other side from counter-attacking. Realistically, however, its more a case of limiting their counterstrike ability. At the very least, the other side is going to get a few (dozen) of them off.

That's why Brother Stormhammer is correct. While its true that 100-200 warheads would make a hell of a mess and would be a devastating strike, it probably wouldn't eliminate the capability of the other side to counterattack. If you fire only one warhead at each airbase, civilian airport and missile silo, for example, a lot of them aren't going to take a direct hit and will either remain functional (esp in the case of hardened silos) or can have basic functionality restored in a matter of days or even hours. And a plan that relies on one warhead per target is subject to all sorts of potential failures that could occur during delivery, further reducing the chances that a particular target is damaged or destroyed.

That's why its necessary to launch multiple strikes on each target, which is the true role of MIRV type missiles. In these cases, multiple warheads of a single missile will not be used, but one warhead from several missiles. This due to the potential for missile failure during the delivery process, which will probably be on the order of 10%. Lets also not forget that MIRV warheads tend to be relatively low yield, on the order of a few hundred kilotons. That's hardly trivial, but far less powerful than what they'd be dumping out of bombers if it ever went down (10-20Mt). Still, one might not get the job done in many cases.

If everything worked perfectly, in order to knock out every Russian silo, every airbase, every civilian airstrip of decent size (and probably even long stretches of flat, straight multiple lane highways), and every naval yard, I'd guess that you could probably do it with about 500-800 warheads. This is assuming a one-strike-per-target model where it all worked perfectly and each one destroyed the target. Reality says we don't live in a perfect world and redundancy is necessary. 1500-2500 is probably more realistic, and this is without even touching cities yet (which would be hit with bombers most likely, not missiles; no need for a fast attack against a target that can't fight back).

The good news? 100-200 would indeed make a huge mess, and both sides know that its highly likely that at least that many would get through even in the best case scenario surprise attack. The attacker wouldn't be destroyed by such a retaliatory strike, but its easily crippling enough to be an enormous deterrent.

Blackwidow, I would say the answer is you can not win a war using nuclear weapons. The obvious reason is MAD. So the aswer to your question about numbers is moot.

Originally posted by BlackWidow23
I hear everyone talking these days:

Russia wins because they have 16,000 warheads vs the USA's 11,000.

If that's what their saying their pretty damn ignorant and should be ignored if for no other reason than their belief that 'more is better'.

But I wondered how much it really takes to win a war. In fact, it would really only take 20 missiles from each side to completely and utterly decimate the other side. This is due to MIRV of course. 20 missiles all carrying 10 RVs could and would wipe out all enemy silos, and god forbid major cities.

Assuming that there are no active or passive defenses or really any preparation at all two hundred warheads could do absolutely vast amounts of damage that could potentially destroy the United states as a functional industrial state with tens if not hundreds of millions dead or dying.

So I wonder...how many of these warhead would be used before the war is won? Even though this would never happen in war, theoretically one or two missiles could wipe out all major US cities and all major Russian cities.

Both countries used to have active and passive defenses for their civilians in the early and mid 60's but since that time the US have taken it's apart while the USSR, now Russia, has continued to upgrade it's own active and passive defenses for many decades now.

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.oism.org...

Industrial dispersal. The Soviets have been involved in an industrial dispersal program for more than 15 years. Their approach to the program has been and continues to be the siting of new industrial complexes in towns and settlements with populations of 100,000 people or less. The program has several advantages for the Soviets. First, it is of great economic importance from the standpoint of accelerating and expanding their economic development; this is especially true regarding growth of such sparsely developed areas as Siberia. Second, it prevents high concentrations of industry in a small number of large industrial centers and helps the Soviets make better use of their abundant natural resources. Third, dispersal creates a proliferation of aimpoints for U.S. strategic planners and greatly complicates targeting tasks.

www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil...

Civil Defense
A dozen years ago, we studied in detail Soviet civil defenses in a number of cities. If we believe those cities are typical and extrapolate the amount of building they have done in the meantime, then according to these unproved assumptions, the Soviets now have good shelters for most of their city population.

Whether this extrapolation is right or not, I do not know. The CIA has either neglected its duty to find out, or has found out -- but not told us. Plans to protect millions of people cannot be considered secret information. We should know, and we have a right to know. We have done practically nothing about civil defense.

www.commonwealthclub.org...

And i could go on but with that but lets move to active defenses...

Immediately prior to the signing of the ABM treaty, the Soviets had developed a surface-to-air missile, the SA-5, which was observed to have a peculiar trajectory. The SA-5 was fired high above the atmosphere and then would descend to intercept and destroy enemy bombers. While technically such a trajectory could not be ruled out, logically, however, it could not be accepted as this type of trajectory represents the least efficient way to shoot down enemy aircraft. On the other hand, the SA-5?s trajectory would be just the ticket for shooting down incoming ballistic missiles which themselves travel above the atmosphere. Taking this into account, the SA-5 had to be an ABM weapon. But with the ABM treaty almost in hand, this fact was ignored and the treaty went into effect. The treaty remains in effect, limiting development of a U.S. ABM system. Meanwhile, Russian dual-purpose (anti-aircraft/anti-missile) missile systems like the SA-5 continue to exist.

www.thenewamerican.com...

However, Soviet and Russian sources, including former Premier Alexei Kosygin and the Chief Designer of the original Moscow ABM system, confirm that: the SA-5 and SA-10 were dual purpose antiaircraft/missile systems (SAM/ABMs), and that the Hen House and LPAR radars provided the requisite battle management target tracking data. These and other sources cited in The ABM Treaty Charade are not exhaustive.

Nevertheless, CIA has not revised its position on this issue, nor have the U.S. Congress and the public been informed that the ABM Treaty was a valid contract from beginning to end.

In the late 1960s the U.S. sacrificed its 20-year technological advantage in ABM defenses on the altar of "arms control." As Russian sources now admit, the Soviet General Staff was in total control of Soviet "arms control" proposals and negotiations, subject to Politburo review, which was largely pro forma. The Soviet military's objective was to gain as much advantage as possible from "arms control" agreements (SALT).

www.jinsa.org...

Mr. Lee's analysis is complex. To vastly simplify, he says he has evidence that Russia's surface-to-air interceptor missiles carry nuclear warheads and therefore are capable of bringing down long-range ballistic missiles, not just aircraft and shorter-range missiles, which is their stated purpose. Russia has 8,000 of these missiles scattered around the country, and Mr. Lee says he has found numerous Russian sources that describe how successive generations of SAMs were in fact designed with the express intention of shooting down ballistic missiles, which is illegal under the treaty.

www.opinionjournal.com...

And i could add the evidence for exotic defenses...

Here is the point: How much of an arsenal does it really take to completely and utterly decimate your enemy? Do you really need 16,000 or 11,000 warheads? Do you really even need 1,000 warheads?

If your the US all those thousands of warheads can apparently not serve to protect you from foreign aggression....

"Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."

So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.

DoD News Briefing
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen

Continued

So who are these 'terrorist' one might ask of the defense Secretary and why can the US armed forces not bomb their 'electromagnetic wave' weapons to dust? Who protects them or which nations have the conventional strategic power to have developed these weapons and operate them without fear of massive retaliation? For all these reasons, and a good many others we could discuss at length, the US nuclear arsenal is quite obsolete and will do the Russian federation little harm.

Originally posted by BlackWidow23
Oh christ...I really dont want to start this discussion. No America vs Russia. We already know what would happen: MAD.

My question is how much it takes to win a war: Does it really take more than a hundred or so?

The Russians never believed in MAD, and i think there is good evidence that proves non one but ignorant citizens ever did, and have consistently prepared to fight and win a full scale nuclear war lasting weeks, months or even years having prepared and distributed ample stocks of nuclear weapons to rearm their existing platforms with.

Originally posted by BlackWidow23
Thats why I think that subs are the ultimate nuclear deterrent. They can move around at 35 MPH, launch 50 megatons of nuclear weapons,

And what use is 50 megatons when few if any warheads detonates, due to defensive enemy action. and the rest are largely absorbed by extensive hardening and dispersal of industrial capacity?

Because of this relative wealth of uncertainty, the final ABM treaty included an explicit obligation in Article VI not to test SAMs "in an ABM mode." Since the ABM testing of the SA-5 could have been completed for some years prior to 1972, the treaty’s impact on an SA-5 ABM capability would be slight. Even at that, the reported repeated violations of the treaty after 1972 by the use of the SA-5 radar in tracking ballistic missiles resulted in Soviet tests against missiles similar in range to a normal SLBM trajectory.35 The Soviets claimed (and the administration) accepted) that the SA-5 radar was not being tested in an ABM mode, but rather was being used in a "legitimate range instrumentation role."36 Whether it is designated as a "range instrumentation radar" does not alter the fact that it has been used in a missile-tracking role. Its ability to track missile warheads on the range is therefore prima facie evidence of its ABM capability. Former Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird claims that thousands of SA-5 interceptors have been deployed in hundreds of sites around some 110 Soviet urban areas, principally in the European U.S.S.R.37 Such a deployment could play havoc with the surviving 1440 SLBM RVs.

The SA-5 anti-SLBM defenses are unorthodox and even "sneaky" in that they exist in the context of an ABM treaty under which the United States officially assumes they do not exist and takes no actions or precautions to counteract the capability. And an SA-5 ABM capability only makes sense in an overall damage-denial scheme which negates ICBMs some other way and reduces the number of SLBM RVs by ASW efforts to levels which can be countered by active SA-5 defenses, civil defense, and hardening of key targets.38

www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil...

Indeed, the upgraded S-300 PM is reported to be capable of hitting a warhead in space and already provides adequate protection to Russia's major cities. In seven to ten seconds a target can be located, fixed, and an interception missile launched. Around 10,000 troops are placed on permanent, around the clock, combat duty with apparently a great deal of work to suggest possible overstretches. "On average, the air defense troops detect and track over 250,000 aircraft, including more than 100,000 foreign aircraft and 1,000-1,500 foreign reconnaissance aircraft every year," commented Mikhailov.

www.jamestown.org...

than than completely dissapear without a trace, impossible to find. When moving at a dead crawl.

As i understand they can be tracked by satellite due to disturbances they cause in the Earth's magnetic field. It's hard to say if that even matters when one can simply shoot down the MIRVed warheads but i suppose the coupling of EM tectonic weapons and those detection means explains why the Russian navy can spend so much time in port these days.

Stellar

Blackwidow23 asks -

"How much of an arsenal does it really take to completely and utterly decimate your enemy? Do you really need 16,000 or 11,000 warheads? Do you really even need 1,000 warheads?"

It depends really what you mean by decimate. If you mean to destroy his ability to retaliate, wage war, his infrastructure, industries & civilian population with 100% certainty then yes you would be talking about thousands of warheads exploding over the United States.

But you really wouldn't need to do that to bring the United States (or for that matter, any other country) to its knees.

Consider first of all the confusion in the upper echelons of government & the military if a Russian missile launch were detected.

We only have to look back at Sept 11th to see how slow to react the government & military was that day. Imagine it hadn't been hijacked airplanes that day, that instead it had been Russian boomers off the eastern seaboard launching a surprise attack on Florida and Washington DC. With a flight time of only a few minutes it would be safe to say that the President, VP & House Speaker would all have been killed. One missile targetted on SAC at Omaha and another at Cheyanne mountain and that would be the US ability to retaliate completely decapitated. By only four missiles.

Now I'm sure somewhere in a bunker we don't know about there's a young air force captain sitting in front of some dusty old tome which tells him what to do in such an eventuality. But would he really launch thousands of missiles against Russia in retaliation for an attack of only four missiles on his own country? Or would he hesitate? By good fortune there may have been a "doomsday plane" already in the air ... how would the officer on board that airplane react? Follow orders written down years ago and initiate all out nuclear war ... or wait for a member of the Cabinet to assume the Presidency and let him decide ? Let's all hope it never happens.

But say the attack had been greater still. Add another twenty missiles and take out the major cities in the USA. Add that to the confusion.

There is, in British thinking at least, a concept very much in the minds of
the nuclear planners. The concept is called "breakdown". Breakdown occurs in your civilian population at that point in a nuclear exchange when they have become so worried about their own survival that the government cannot rely on them to carry out instructions for their own protection or orders for the waging of war. Breakdown would obviously occur in a city where the bomb has been dropped ... but it would also occur in the suburbs & hinterland of that city too ... because the people there have seen the bomb explode & the effects it produces.

They're going to be too busy looting supermarkets, building makeshift shelters, putting out fires or tending to the wounded than listening to anything that's being broadcast by whats left of the government via the emergency broadcasting networks. That's for sure.

And you can safely forget about your remaining population for at least two weeks ... because they're all gonna have to be under cover for that length of time if they wish to avoid the worst of the radioactive fallout that's coming their way.

Authoritative British government studies as early as the 1950's (the Strath Committee Report 1955) indicated that the UK would completely cease to function with the detonation of as few as 10 nuclear weapons ... and that both the USA and Russia would be totally ruined by the detonation of as few as 450 nuclear weapons over their territories.

So at what point have you lost the war ?
1. When every city & military base is an irradiated ruin ?
2. Or when you have no effective government/military control and your population has broken down ?

It'd take thousands of missiles to achieve (1). But it doesnt take that many, in the great scheme of things, to achieve (2). And that's what we should really be worried about.

Very well presented post Niall197. That was the reasoning behind my reply to the original question.

The trouble is, there are people in government who, along with many who post on these pages, believe that it would take hundreds if not thousands of nuclear warhaeds to destroy an 'enemy' country.

They also believe quite wrongly, that warheads need to be big to destroy their intended targets. This is of course, ludicrous. Whilst a 1 Mt warhead will definately kill more people and cause more damage than a 1 Kt warhead, that is not the issue.

An average city or military facility is constructed using reinforced concrete, steel and glass. Even underground bunkers are constructed with the same materials, unless of course they were hewn from a mountainside.

My point is, a 1 Kt warhead detonated as a ground burst, will still destroy an underground facility in much the same way as would a warhead of say 10 Mt. The only difference is that the damage and fallout from the 10 Mt warhead will be greater - which of course is overkill!

Why? Because at the instant of the explosion, everything above, below and alongside, will be vapourised, a massive crater will be formed, the entire area will be heavily irradiated. Job done.

On the other hand, an airburst over a city, sea port or naval dockyard will do just as much damage as a ground or surface burst. Water and glass do have the ability to reflect the tremendous 'heat' which will of course also
'enhance' it's effects.

The Cheyenne Mountain II facility in Colorado is some 2,500 feet below ground. Although it is one of the deepest USAF facilities anywhere in the world, it is still vulnerable to nuclear attack.

It would take one or two warheads to totally seal the area off from outside help and, if one warhead was a Neutron enhanced weapon, the area would be so contaminated [that] it would not be worth the trouble of trying to rescue people by digging them out.

Shocking and unacceptable though this may seem, that is the inescapable truth.

Actually, 1mt weapons are fairly rare these days. In the early days of the nuclear 'game', they were more common, simply because you couldn't count on missiles to deliver them within lethal range of a target...so, to make up for the lack of accuracy, you used a larger warhead. Early models of the Atlas and Titan, for example, had CEP measured in miles, and as a result, used megaton-range warheads. By the time Minuteman was in service, the same job could be done with 550kt, and later, 350kt warheads, because the CEP was (at least according to open-source documents) down in the 100m range.

With the latest generation of PGM, I'd strongly suspect that some targets that used to require nuclear weapons can be engaged with conventional munitions. Developments like the fuel-air munition also reduce the number of actual nuclear devices you need, which is, in my not exactly humble opinion, a good thing.

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop (however you spell that) AKA how many nukes does it take to get to the center of the earth....hehe

One thing just crossed my mind - what if someone was to hit a nuke right in between 2 plates in the earth. I forget what they're caled in english; you know, the constantly shifting plates in the earth. That could trigger devestating earthquakes would it not? I think this would play a big part.

Regards,
Maestro

Originally posted by fritz
How many nukes does it take? Not an easy question to answer.

Not easy at all and we should all hope it gets no easier.

Are we supposing a period of political tension and rising readiness states within the military, that could eventually, lead to a conventional war?

Are we also supposing that one of the belligerents are loosing and loosing badly enough to consider the nuclear option?

In this age it is as far as i know quite near impossible to hide the preparations for a conventional or nuclear war from other states.. If the USSR/Russia ever came under attack it never in my knowledge intended to fight a conventional war for very long or at all.

Are we looking at a 'first strike' as the only option available to a government?If we (NATO) were loosing a conventional war against the former Warsaw Pact, I can tell you now, the only response would have been to go nuclear. Not only on the battlefield, but also retalitory strikes against the major cities of the aggressor.

For which the USSR were far in my knowledge far better prepared in both passive and active responses. Since i am sure that you are familiar with all the strategic weaponry ( both hidden and not so hidden) i will leave it at that and say that in my opinion escalation would have been to the advantage of the US till the early 70's but not in my knowledge after that.

If we consider a strike against a non nuclear country, then the standard is Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I think there are important differences in that few people in those cities were in shelters at the time ( air raid sirens did not sound for singular planes or small formations due to the economic impact of work stoppages) and that the cities themselves had been spared bombardment up to that point meaning lesser passive defenses and fewer people seeking shelter at any given time. As it was people DIRECTLY under the detonation survived in normal open tunnel air raid type shelters and so did almost everyone who were in normal air raid shelters.. If a siren had sounded and people were in cover the fatalities would have been massively reduced.

Were we to go up against a nuclear armed country using a pre-emptive strike, we need to consider the options available.

Let's take the United States as our 'target', no offense intended to our friends across the pond.

The First Strike should be targetted as follows:

1. High yield airbursts or exo-atmospheric detonations over command and control centres of the US military, concentrating on Washington State, Wyoming and Nevada - possibly launched from space or atmospheric vehicle of some type. Surprise is essential in order to obtain a complete electronic 'blackout'.

FOBS would probably work as well today as it would have back in the day and i wonder how many minutes warning, if any, there would be. Since the US defense secretary has pointed out the reality of Scalar tectonic weapons there might really be no warning at all.

2-supposes that POTUS is aloft in Air Force One. A small nuclear weapon detonated 1 mile from AF1 (airburst) would render the US military leaderless for a few hours.

I truly 'effective' first strike ( however impossibly unlikely a no warning first strike may be) i doubt AF1 would even get into the air. That being said it is very hard to imagine a political crisis and third world war that has no lead up lasting many weeks if not months; one does not simply put your country on a nuclear exchange footing within a few weeks.

3-military installations need to be taken down quickly with either ground or airburst detonations.

Depending on who the attacker is, there would be a need to neutralize the USAF facilities at Keflavik (Iceland) together with Sondrestrom and Thule (Greenland), Anderson (Guam) and of course Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean)

And as far as i know there only about five countries on Earth with the ICBM type forces that could consider such actions and for half of them it would also mean national suicide...

4. Nuclear weapon and storage sites need to be destroyed as quickly as possible.

5. The US Navy needs to be located and destroyed using conventional anti-ship missiles together with nuclear weapons set to detonate within 5 to 10 nautical miles.

As you can see, the list is endless. The above is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are far too many variables to ensure that even a first strike is 100% effective.

And as you note this 'fantasy' scenario is all predicated on the almost impossibly unlikely 'bolt from the blue' situation where there is no intelligence,military or political warning to speak off. By now we all know, or should know, that the US leadership and intelligence agencies were well aware of at LEAST the general intent of 9-11 plot so no one should really give the pre-emptive 'surprise' nuclear war stories much credence if they are willing and able to read and follow international news as provided by any given selection of region specific press services.

Stellar