What If: Nuclear Bomb detonates in New York City

[Eleas]

Also, what if it's not the Taliban or Al Qadia, or whoever, but a new group that no one has information on?

Then the consequences don't bear thinking. All the worst, most self-serving justifications for War on Terrah seen so far will suddenly become tantamount to bleeding-heart liberalism as far as the public is concerned, for an indefinite and possibly unending time.


GHETTO EDIT: Also, in retrospect, my previous post wasn't meant to be nearly as sarcastic and/or condemnatory as it came across. The gist of what I want to convey is this: as far as I know, no-one is arguing (or should be, for that matter) about how nuclear retaliation would be justified, just that it would be likely to happen. As for the likelihood of the US (for instance) nuking Germany if Germany dropped an A-bomb on an American city, I'm not even remotely qualified to judge. My gut tells me Serafina has it right, though, because the US has little choice but to retaliate given that sort of provocation, and they'd really have no reason to do it by halves either.

[Simon_Jester]

As compared to nuking Germany as Serafina suggested was possible?

You weren't paying attention. She gave Germany (and Australia) as an example of 'what would happen' if certain nations were hit by nuclear attack, not as a plausible candidate for such an attack.

The point being that if you hit Germany with nuclear attacks on all the major cities, the countryside in between is so battered and burned and irradiated that the country becomes nearly uninhabitable. The same is true of, say, Britain, which influenced British cold war strategy.

Whereas a nation with fewer cities spaced farther apart, like Australia, there is a significant rural hinterland that is still superficially all right after the bombs fall. Which would be the case in either the US or Russia, for instance. Of course, the hinterland might be economic wreckage, but there'd at least be a recognizable country and not just a radioactive wasteland.

[MKSheppard]

People, lets all have a freaking reality check here.

US nukes are transported under extremely heavy armed guard in specially modified armored 18 wheelers escorted by equally heavily modified suburbans full of large irritable government agents.


Nobody's going to walk away with them easily.

Likewise, the few bombs that are out of the government's hands -- one Mark 15 H-Bomb somewhere in the mud off Tybee Island, Georgia -- have been buried for so long that the fissile would have corroded so badly, along with all other internal components; that it would do nothing.

Elsewhere, Germany or Australia don't have sekrit bomb programs; and it takes a major industrial scale effort to reprocess and separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel; so stealing fissile out of a spent reactor pool is out of the question.

North Korea? They may be crazy, but they're rational crazy. The leadership likes living like sybaritic dictators; so the Nork stockpile is locked down.

Same for all the other nations with bombs, like UK, France, India, Russia, China.

Pakistan on the other hand is crazy, and full of crazies crazies. They're the most likely candidate to 'lose' a device. Though in such a case, it would be 'lost' with a group that would detonate it in India...

[Simon_Jester]

Germany and Australia were, I repeat, examples- Serafina was trying to get at the same thing that Stuart is getting at when he says that towns in Germany are located 200 kilotons apart.

EDIT: Whereas towns in Australia are probably more like 200 megatons apart, by the same measurement.

[Questor]

Around the world, every government official is woken up.

Every government official in Pakistan (and anywhere else that thinks the US might think they have insecure weapons) collectively shit themselves. ISI attempts to decapitate Al Queda and the Taliban and pray that heads on pikes satisfy the US.

Then, the world gets reminded what happens when a kitten tries to fight an alligator.

Also, I would suspect that when/if certain countries try to deny use of airspace, the response will simply be laughter.

[K. A. Pital]

US nukes are transported under extremely heavy armed guard in specially modified armored 18 wheelers escorted by equally heavily modified suburbans full of large irritable government agents.

What happens if that's not enough? I.e. there's an OAS-like organization in the U.S. military itself, which perpetrates the act? Duh.

[Lonestar]

But what happens worldwide?

Will Russia use this as an excuse to saturation bomb Chechnya into submission for good with Tu-95s? Etc.

Chechnya is now a Paragon of Pro-Russia Muslim States.

[Lonestar]

What happens if that's not enough? I.e. there's an OAS-like organization in the U.S. military itself, which perpetrates the act? Duh.

I would say that that would be a pretty neat trick.

I mean, you do know that background checks and shit are done on personnel even remotely related to nukes, right? I had a coworker who worked with TLAMs and was prohibited from working on them during a certain type of exercise because of his Dad's crazy-ass militia politics.

It's a bit like when Thanas said in the "Facebook login" thread about only an agency like the CIA should require it. Ha! An agency like the CIA is going to have a keylogger on your work computer and will start monitoring your social media accounts and email as soon as it grabs the logins the first time you dick around on the internets instead of working on that excel spreadsheet. So, it would be very hard for some kind of organization within the military(I believe that the DoE does security for most nuclear materials stuff anyway) like the one your proposing to exist...or to exist to the point that it can get away with it.

[weemadando]

But what about if the people who were running this organisation CONTROLLED the vetting process? WHAT THEN HUH? WHAT THEN?!?!?

[Lonestar]

Well shit.

[tim31]

We're through the looking glass here

So in the 'Jolly old Terry Wrist attacks the convoy and is looking like getting away with it' is there a contingency which involves conceding an entire neighbourhood to a Bayesque airstrike or something similarly cheerful?

[aerius]

What happens if that's not enough? I.e. there's an OAS-like organization in the U.S. military itself, which perpetrates the act? Duh.

I would say that that would be a pretty neat trick.

It happened in a Rogue Warrior book, therefore it must be true!

[dragon]

incase you were wondering about the blast radius, parts of NY are stil standing. I know after 9/11 New Yorkers kinda of banded to gether. So would lots of volunteers for everything from sanitation to helping the shell shock people. The rest of the city will hane power, no water and food will become scarce. As for the people behind it I doubt any country will harbor them after all they blew up two towers we kind of blew of 2 countries. Either way there's going to be alot of pissed off Americans and they have convient targets at hand. After look how many muslims were target after 9/11 most of them being are neighbors, friends and coworkers.

And then of course the looters and others people that try and take advantage of the sistuations are going to be all over.



edit sory to include that the map is for over pressure only.

[Mr Bean]

We're through the looking glass here

So in the 'Jolly old Terry Wrist attacks the convoy and is looking like getting away with it' is there a contingency which involves conceding an entire neighbourhood to a Bayesque airstrike or something similarly cheerful?

Your talking about a sixty ton container in a vehicle that can be remotely shut down. The only way they are getting away with it is to have a secondary transport and a full crane on standby to move it. It's size and weight is both a design requirement and a feature. By all means you could get forty nut jobs together and assault the convoy. But unless they also have SAM's the best they can do is stop the convoy. They are not going to be able to take anything because again, giant hunk of metal that weighs a ton, can't be broken into in under an hour and is transported in such a way that the only quick way to knock it lose from it's transport is to hit it with a rocket powered train.

And yes that was a real DOE test.
Second half of the video is the American tests first half is British tests. These are nuclear waste containers, the warhead transporters take this and increase it by a factor of Shep.

[Col. Crackpot]

incase you were wondering about the blast radius, parts of NY are stil standing. I know after 9/11 New Yorkers kinda of banded to gether. So would lots of volunteers for everything from sanitation to helping the shell shock people. The rest of the city will hane power, no water and food will become scarce. As for the people behind it I doubt any country will harbor them after all they blew up two towers we kind of blew of 2 countries. Either way there's going to be alot of pissed off Americans and they have convient targets at hand. After look how many muslims were target after 9/11 most of them being are neighbors, friends and coworkers.

And then of course the looters and others people that try and take advantage of the sistuations are going to be all over.



edit sory to include that the map is for over pressure only.

it would actually be worse. Ground Zero (Times square) would be closer to midtown, thus taking out nearly all of Manhattan.

The political climate in the US would demand nothing less than the immediate and liberal usage of the nuclear arsenal on (hopefully) the responsible party. If it is in fact a nation such as Pakistan i would hope we would restrain ourselves to strategic nuclear and military targets. Lighting up population centers like Karaichi and Islamabad for shits and giggles as 'punishment' would likely be a stain on our national honor that we could never recover from.

[phongn]

The political climate in the US would demand nothing less than the immediate and liberal usage of the nuclear arsenal on (hopefully) the responsible party. If it is in fact a nation such as Pakistan i would hope we would restrain ourselves to strategic nuclear and military targets. Lighting up population centers like Karaichi and Islamabad for shits and giggles as 'punishment' would likely be a stain on our national honor that we could never recover from.

Guess how many military targets would be in major population centers

[Mr Bean]

Guess how many military targets would be in major population centers

In countries like... all countries the answer is "all of them"

This includes the US as except for missile silos all military bases evolve into medium sized towns at the very least, places like Britain where entire cities have grown over old army bases. China, Iran, Pakistan, aside from Russia who has remote silos like we do most military targets are directly next to major cities.

[Col. Crackpot]

The political climate in the US would demand nothing less than the immediate and liberal usage of the nuclear arsenal on (hopefully) the responsible party. If it is in fact a nation such as Pakistan i would hope we would restrain ourselves to strategic nuclear and military targets. Lighting up population centers like Karaichi and Islamabad for shits and giggles as 'punishment' would likely be a stain on our national honor that we could never recover from.

Guess how many military targets would be in major population centers

Granted, but what i meant was i wouldn't want us to target cities because they are strategic assets. In an event such as this our aim should be to eliminate nuclear and cripple conventional forces. Not glass the country.

[dragon]

The political climate in the US would demand nothing less than the immediate and liberal usage of the nuclear arsenal on (hopefully) the responsible party. If it is in fact a nation such as Pakistan i would hope we would restrain ourselves to strategic nuclear and military targets. Lighting up population centers like Karaichi and Islamabad for shits and giggles as 'punishment' would likely be a stain on our national honor that we could never recover from.

Guess how many military targets would be in major population centers

Granted, but what i meant was i wouldn't want us to target cities because they are strategic assets. In an event such as this our aim should be to eliminate nuclear and cripple conventional forces. Not glass the country.

Thats what prescision bombing. But lets be honest do you really the average American would care. Hell we firebombed Tokyo burnning a large portion of the city done.

[K. A. Pital]

So, it would be very hard for some kind of organization within the military(I believe that the DoE does security for most nuclear materials stuff anyway) like the one your proposing to exist...or to exist to the point that it can get away with it.

Organizations like this rarely use e-mail contact, they prefer to rely on direct communications. If there would be such an organization among the higher officer ranks, why on earth would they use the internet to relay something about their politics if they know the CIA's watching them? There are ways to communicate securely even over the net (e.g. skype voice calls).

[Lonestar]

Organizations like this rarely use e-mail contact, they prefer to rely on direct communications. If there would be such an organization among the higher officer ranks, why on earth would they use the internet to relay something about their politics if they know the CIA's watching them? There are ways to communicate securely even over the net (e.g. skype voice calls).

Man, you are missing the point. I used that to show that there is means to casually search for such suspicious behavior, and I mentioned a coworker who wasn't near the damned things because of shit his Dad did(in 2004, before the era of Facebook and such).

Stas, are you of the opinion that the US military is filled with multiple crazy people who squeeze past the vetting process and then have the means to steal US nuclear material and weapons? Is that it?

Do you think that the CIA got rid of that meddlin' Kennedy as well?


EDIT: Just to be clear here, Stas used a Organization from the 60s(in France) as an example of the US Military committing some kind of (false-flag?) terrorist attack on US Citizenry. The big difference here is that France had a long history of violent revolution every couple of decades or so, and the US has long been one of the military clearly being under civilian control with the most violent civil unrest in the States since the Great Depression being the anti-war/civil rights movement in the 60/70s. In other words, I don't think Stas really cogitates that the US is a bedrock of civil stability, at all levels of government.

Oh yeah, and the other big difference is that in the 60s the way you communicated with everyone was by phone or in person, meanwhile in 21st Century America...(ESPECIALLY .mil)

[Col. Crackpot]

Thats what prescision bombing. But lets be honest do you really the average American would care. Hell we firebombed Tokyo burnning a large portion of the city done.

So long as the precision ordinance has an N designation and produced an artificial sunrise, the blood lust would be sufficiently sated.

[hongi]

In other words, I don't think Stas really cogitates that the US is a bedrock of civil stability, at all levels of government.

Why is this the case anyhow?

[Lonestar]

Why is this the case anyhow?

Why is what?

[Rabid]

" Why is the US a bedrock of civil stability ? " ?