Comment by 0xbadcafebee
3 days ago
So, assume 10 of them do make it through defenses. One hits Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC, Norfolk, Miami, Chicago, San Diego, LA, SF. That's 28 million people and most of the political, financial, administrative, logistical, shipping and naval centers.
Sure, humanity survives. But in a state akin to Europe in 1918. Massive casualties, destruction, horror, economic calamity, famine, general chaos, which will persist for at least a decade. And this would be in every major developed nation. So... perhaps it is not a good idea to use them. Perhaps the "misconception" that the world will end is the only reason they haven't been used.
A full scale exchange would be much, much worse than Europe in 1918. Against a peer adversary, ABM systems can protect 1 city at the very most.
There will be people on both sides who know how many warheads are required, and in which locations, to destroy the capability to generate electricity and refine petroleum at a national scale. This kind of industrial capacity, once destroyed, takes years to replace. Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long. You are looking at hundreds of millions of deaths in weeks or months.
The only people who can seriously entertain this live close enough to a high value target to be assured of their immediate demise.
>Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long [i.e., years].
Untrue. A survey done by nuclear-war planners in the 1980s found that there is enough food stored on or near farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years. During peacetime, most of this food is fed to farm animals, but there is no reason it cannot be used to keep people alive instead.
This food, mostly grains and soybeans, must be milled to be nutritious to people, but the (diesel-powered) equipment to do the milling tends to be stored near the food, so the trucks that bring the food from the farms to the population centers can just bring the milling equipment, too (and maybe the equipment for toasting grains, which I understand is widely done to grains fed to farm animals).
Water is continuously falling out of the sky and can also be obtained from underground.
You cannot sustain a population center of any size on rainfall. For that, you need electricity to operate municipal pumps (which will likely be absent, as above - if not immediately after generation and distribution is destroyed, then a few weeks later when fuel for the generators is exhausted). Without that the bulk of the population is dead in under a week.
Repurposing feed grain reserves is interesting, but you need fuel for that as well (plus significant coordination, which seems unlikely in a scenario where many people with the required knowledge and authority may be dead and telecommunications infrastructure is destroyed).
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