RamscoopRaider
Donor
Fourth largest port in the country, makes sense to hit it so it can't be usedBeaumont, Texas is a nuclear target???
Edit: Ninja'd by Asnys
Fourth largest port in the country, makes sense to hit it so it can't be usedBeaumont, Texas is a nuclear target???
Back when I studied this in Uni the USSR in late 1962 could only hit the US with about 340 warheads, and a US first strike would get 90% of those. 2 years later I imagine the balance would be more in the USSR's favour as they deployed their 1st generation of proper ICBMs, but still overwhelmingly in the US's favour.
Now, let's see how the butterflies fly. No Soviet threat means no space race. No push for ICBM's and a man on the moon means the intense research needed for the IC chips that would revolutionize electronics in later decades. Without US government funding to push electronics, the world might remain frozen in late-sixties technology for a long time. No Internet, no cell phones, no world wide web and computers remain mainframe devices confined to government, large businesses and universities.
Why the huge clusters in Montana and North Dakota? Is that where the silos are?
And all ground bursts. Fun stuff downwind.Yep. Fillertax
Why the huge clusters in Montana and North Dakota? Is that where the silos are?
Also depending on the TL, southwestern Missouri, south of KC and north of Joplin had as many silos as the other fields. Also South Dakota had a large field of at least 150 silos. However hitting each silo in any field is a crap shoot. They knew the location of the control centers so there would really be 25-30 strikes for each field.
As for nuclear winter, the TTAPS model was flawed to extreme as they did not take into account terrain effects, using a FLAT world among other things. More like a nuclear 'autumn' than winter.
The issue with "nuclear" winter isn't so much the bombs themselves, it's the dust and ash that makes it up into the stratosphere (most of the stuff that doesn't get so high falls out pretty quickly, so is not of significance in driving longer term cooling).So that study should be taken with a grain of salt
Now, the problem is, firestorms haven't exactly been common since WW2 and it's kinda hard to get permission to burn a city to the ground even for science, so we have little observational data on what happens in the atmosphere above a firestorm. With little observational data it is thus hard to generate a realistic parameterization of the vertical distribution of ash and dust to input into a climate model....
For sure, however the map fails to reflect the missile field for Grand Forks, or is this current targets? Eastern NoDak had as many silos as the western area. Third largest nuclear power in the world.
Yes, this is the biggest issue for the accuracy. The parametrization is done basically on data of massive forest fires (which are much lower in temperature than the city firestorms produced by a nuclear heatwave, and still, some of the soot particles reach the stratosphere), and large eruptions (although the particles expelled into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions are typically 5 times larger, in average, than the soot of high temperature fires, they stay airborne up to 2 years).
What about Second World War firebombings? They might not have been of such magnitude as an atomic war, but might not any soot injected by firebombings in Germany and Japan have made an impact on the temperature data at that time?
Actually, the winter of 46-47 was unusually cold... Which probably doesn't mean anything, but take it for what it's worth.