Yeah that's my assumption as well. The saturation of that area was surprising. I looked at my state out of curiosity and it was what you'd expect, population centers and military bases, but nothing to that degree.

Also - Americans won't even wear masks anymore during a peacetime pandemic. Imagine the chaos, fear, and anger if there was a nuclear war. If the radiation doesn't kill you - other Americans will.

Oooh I didn’t know he posted to Reddit. I used to follow him on Twitter, but he quit or got banned. His account is a goldmine for War Nerds…

From 6 months ago:

I am more worried now about the potential for nuclear war than perhaps ever.

:yea:

I think that a first strike might be possible on the US but not on Russia. Let's assume an intelligence failure and that some Russian forces are able to generate to alert status in a covert manner. I think that it's possible to initially do a limited first strike on both the East and West coast using stealth Kh-102 nuclear cruise missiles. These will not be detected until there is a NUDET. You could take out all the SSPARS (early warning radars), the White House, the Pentagon, Site R, and the SSBN bases at Kings Bay and Bangor immediately prior to a massive ICBM/SLBM strike. So now, the President and top military leadership in DC are dead. At this point, we'll still have DSP/SBIRs/etc. picking up the missile plumes and USSTRATCOM will be trying to reach out to surviving leadership. Soon, the weapons begin to detonate on all NAOCs and TACAMOs on the ground and to take out the ground entry points for these systems. Yes, we still have the alert- and mod-alert SSBNs on patrol, but this scenario might be doable. Or might not. Hard to say.

What scares me the most is a preemptive attack from Russian stealth Kh-102 ALCMs. I do not think that we would ever see that coming, and yes, there are ways to fool us that the ALCM carriers are spoofing ADS-B as airliners/etc.

:putin-wink:

I'm former intelligence community (Department of Energy and Defense Intelligence Agency). I have high confidence in the weapon systems reliability of Russian nuclear weapons and missiles. What is happening in Ukraine is not transferrable to the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces/etc.

Almost refreshing to see someone with professional knowledge of these things refute the idiocy of “but lol the nukes won’t work”. Obviously it’s not refreshing as it means that 90-95% of the US population would be dead in 18 months, but still. There’s at least some people who take this seriously, somewhere in the empire.

mass migration to Canada/Mexico might happen tho, right?

I only glanced at the NM map for a couple seconds. I don't know if Los Alamos was a target. If targets are crudely based (on population, nukes, military bases, etc) - the answer is probably "no". Los Alamos has a very small population.