1959 Nuclear weapon countThe book came out in 1959, so less numbers and yield at that point.
1959 Nuclear weapon count
USA
15,468
USSR
1,060
UK
25
![]()
![]()
USA was making around 3-5000 new warheads a year from 1957 to 1965, when production slowed and older designs withdrawn.
At the same time, the USSR was a couple hundred a year from 1957 to 1960, then around 1K till 1970, up to 2K where they kept running at till Gorby was in power.
They had passed US warhead count in 1977. In 1985 it was 23,510 to 39,197, with US accuracy advantage allowing smaller warheads to do the same 'work' as the old City Busters
The early fiction assumed that Khrushchev's bluster on making them like sausages was true.
No, that was all bluff, while the USA turned production to '11' for a decade.
WWIII would have been very one sided until 1966 or so
Yeah, when the Air Force colonel visited Randy Bragg's house in Fort Repose, Randy asked who won the war. The colonel said, "We really clobbered them! Not that it matters."
Denver was the new US capital, and the AF colonel and his crew were staging out of a base in Georgia, as I remember. The Fort Repose doctor had lost his glasses and had had his medical gear stolen. Randy asked the colonel if he could get the doctor new glasses and some medical gear, and the colonel said he thought he could requisition the glasses, if he had the prescription, and the medical stuff. Randy's sister-in-law went and got the prescription.
Believe recovery would have picked up fairly quickly, at least in the USA, since it wouldn't have been hit as hard as the USSR/Warsaw Pact.
Great book. If you haven't read it, you really should. Easily available.
First read it the mid 60's, did not help me sleep at night since I was in a first strike target. ...
Well I think it's worth considered that all in all, the exchange is relatively localized to just NATO and the WARSAW Pact. Plus, I'm pretty sure it's done with older and lower yield Nukes, akin to Fat Man and Little Boy. But I could be wrong on that. That could explain why the damage is comparatively light.
Fair point, I retract the Fat Man/ Little boy thing (don't know where I got that from.) But as has been pointed out by others, the yeild is smaller than we're used to. And as shown in the book, there ARE survivors and areas that are more or less unaffected. So there's that.I just checked my copy of the book. It says that Soviet nukes hit Homestead Air Force Base, Miami International Airport, MacDill Air Force Base, Naval Air Station Jacksonville, McCoy Air Force Base, and Orlando Municipal Airport. Those were the explosions visible from Fort Repose. The book also says that each nuke was in the megaton range. That would be consistent with the typical warheads on Soviet ICBMs at the time the book was written. The land-based R-7 carried a 3 megaton nuke; the sub-launched R-13 had a 1-2 megaton nuke. With those yields, the damage would be massive. The book states that Miami, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Jacksonville, and Orlando were completely destroyed and are heavily irradiated.