this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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People have to remember, it's not so much cities themselves that could be targets in a nuclear war. The first to go would likely be military bases, international airports and seaports (pretty much anything that can launch and support military equipment and personnel), and the hundreds of missile silos that dot Missouri and Montana.
Secondary targets would be industrial centers like steel mills and chemical plants, and railroad yards. Communication hubs and tech centers might be hit as well.
Most of these things just happen to be in major cities, but the cities themselves aren’t targets, and people living in suburban and rural areas aren’t necessarily safe.
(Of course, all this is based on outdated Cold War-era nuclear exchange theories that may or may not have changed. The communication hub thing for example: the Internet was originally created as a means of decentralizing communication in case of a nuclear attack. So take everything I said here with a grain of salt.)
See the problem is most east coast and a lot of West Coast cities have major military installations inside of them or very near them. Additionally, military targets are only the first wave of all out nuclear war, major civilian targets are chosen to weaken logistical networks and slow recovery. So if you live in a city with a large port, rail way, interstate, or airport. Than your probably fucked.
This is all part of unclassified plans from the cold war you can find on the Internet. There's a million YouTube videos about what an all out nuclear war would look like based off those documents. Given nuclear technology hasn't seen any major improvements sense these plans were written, it's probably safe to assume they're still mostly valid.
The two nuclear bombs dropped by the US on Japan were pointedly targeting mass civilian population centres, I don't think you can rely on them being targeted with any real strategic logic, they are the tools of the genocidal and the deranged.
I sure hope Australia doesn't decide to dock nuclear-powered submarines a few km from me