About airbursts, groundbursts and runways,
Russian CEPs were not great but I am surprised that they were not tight enough to reasonably reliably put a grounbursts crater across a runway.
If the Russian missiles were that inaccurate wouldn't they have almost no counterforce capacity against silos, which are smaller and harder targets than runways? Why hide Mt Weather etc if the Russians can't destroy hardened targets? I am happy to accept that the Soviet threat was played up by the military and politicians for their own end but there being no counterforce threat to the US at all seems a bit extreme.
Still this has important implications if true - it would free up a couple of thousand Soviet warheads I had assumed would have been targeted on missile silos. If they were instead targeted at 1000 additional transport, industrial and military sites I think that would do a lot more damage to the US than blasting missile Silos in Nebraska.
I seriously doubt they had that many problems in '84{if this had been the late '50s and early '60s we were talking about, then yeah}..............and most of those 2,000 warheads you mentioned absolutely would have been targeted at the silos, so the U.S. couldn't launch a second massive nuke attack in the future{we almost certainly would have, sadly; we did have a Republican administration at the time, and there was always a good chance of anti-Communist fervor reaching the point where people would want the enemy totally destroyed no matter the cost..........not to mention many of our bombers wouldn't be able to make it home.}. It just made more sense in '84 then, than in say.........1962 or something.