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If you haven't heard of the N1 rocket, Wikipedia is useful for covering most of your bases. Basically, it was the Soviet answer to the United States' Saturn V rocket, and intended to launch the USSR's lunar mission into space. With a payload of 95 tons into NEO, it wouldn't put as much into space as the Saturn V, but it was still an impressive feat of engineering. Or at least it would have been, if it hadn't failed every single time it launched.

But what if it was used for a more sinister purpose? Say Brezhnev gets booted at some point in the late 1960s in favor of a Soviet leadership that wants to play hardball with the United States. With a payload of 95 tons, there is a lot you could do with the N1. You could have the Russians put a good scare into SAC if they beat the United States with putting MIRVs on a missile like this: even assuming extremely crude Soviet techniques, you could conceivably put as many as 10 25 MT devices into one of these, plus 20-30 very convincing decoys.

If this alt-Soviet leadership wanted to play crazy in order to extract concessions from the US (or to just piss America off more) they could put one giant warhead on top of the N1. If you scale up the Tsar Bomba linearly, the N1 could drop a 200-300 MT warhead somewhere. This would be a weapon for the truly insane indeed, capable of a decapitation strike on practically the entire East Coast at one blow.

Of course, the N1 was designed as a space launch vehicle using liquid oxygen (LOX) as a (cryogenic) propellant, so it doesn't really look like a first strike weapon. The silos to hold such a thing would simply be enormously expensive, to boot.

Is this feasible at all? What effects do you think this would cause if the first few missiles became operational in 1971?
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