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| quote: | Originally posted by Beat Blog
You just contradicted yourself within two sentences.
It was always about range. Why do you think the Cuban Missile Crisis was such a big issue? Up until then, the USSR didn't have anything within practical striking distance of the US. |
You are looking at nuclear warfare in very blunt terms my friend.
The US has better accuracy, which enables a better first strike capability. The Trident D5 (Trident II) has a circular error probability (where a warhead will fall 50% of the time) of 200-300 feet. Each one of these missiles can carry up to 12 individually targeted warheads of up to 475 Kilotons (that's thousands of tons of TNT) in yield. For comparisons in yield, Hiroshima was only 13 Kilotons and it destroyed the whole city.
Alright, now lets talk about range, range is not an issue in how you are thinking of it. All these countries can hit each other, that has not been an issue. Range in nuclear warfare is all about TIME. The shorter amount of time it takes your missiles to reach the other guys the better.
Nuclear war will be fought in three stages.
The first stage is the most critical. In this stage you target the enemies missiles and bombers (hopefully while still on the ground). Here time to target and accuracy take the cake. The faster your missiles get there and the more accurate they are the more likely you are able to get their birds on the ground. The other half of this part is decapitation strikes on the enemy nations capital. Very depressed trajectory sub launched ballistic missiles will be used to take out the nations capitals, hopefully slowing the nations response time.
This is where the Trident D5 comes into play, its very accurate, very survivable (its in submarines), and has short flight times... With each missile boat carrying 24 of these you can hit a whole of targets very very fast.
I won't go into much detail about the second and third stages, but basically the second stage is to hit industrial and military complex targets, such as power plants, airports, naval and army bases, etc. The third stage is to target population centers.
The Cuban missile crisis was not about the range, the Soviets had missiles that could hit the US from Russia at that time, granted not many, and they were fairly unreliable, but they could. Cuba presented a shorter flight time. 10 minutes across the Eastern Seaboard. Not nearly enough time for the US to mobilize its nuclear forces.
Even at this time the US had missile systems in Turkey that could hit Moscow in about the same amount of time, but the US still maintained a fleet of Atlas and Titan/Titan II ICBM's in the US as well as a large heavy bomber force.
This was the same all the way up till the end of the Cold War, granted beyond SLBM forces the Soviets never placed ground launched missiles within short striking distance of the United States, but they did have MIRV tipped SS-20's on their western border within 2-3 minutes striking times of most of the western European capitals. The US had GLCM systems and the Pershing II systems in the UK and West Germany as well, all providing short flight times to Moscow. At this same time both sides maintained a massive set of ICBMs (SS-18 Satans among others in the Soviet Union, and Minuteman II/III and Peacekeeper systems in the US).
So I did not contradict myself, the US has more accurate/faster systems, but the Soviets/Russians have more systems, but that is all moot anyways because both sides have enough power to destroy the world many many times over.
I'm sort of a nuclear war buff... so I'm pretty sure I'm spot on with most of this information... 
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