
Missilemap - Fej
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/missilemap/faq/
======
sillysaurus3
If anyone is interested in a real-life simulation of a nuclear missile crisis:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA)

I try to plug it whenever I can. It's an amazing piece of art, and it's one of
the best ghost stories ever told.

Wow. It's gone.

And I didn't wget the video when I had the chance.

I can't believe it's gone.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508078)
All of them. There were like nine versions of the video, published by an
anonymous author over the course of a year and a half. People were suspecting
it was more than just a talented amateur. We'll never know.

That's so strange! Ben Marking, who are you?

EDIT: It's up.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE)
Thanks to dcgoss and junkculture for looking. Apparently they removed all the
old revisions, so we're left with this one.

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mdekkers
What is the point of this, other then scaremongering?

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rb666
It serves as a reminder that it's wise to have a mentally stable commander in
chief.

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danso
Related: the author recently wrote this 5-year retrospective about NUKEMAP,
which is MISSILEMAP's precursor

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2017/02/03/nukemap-5-years/](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2017/02/03/nukemap-5-years/)

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BenjiWiebe
Interesting. What I really admire is the work that went into it, like
documenting how to construct a permalink, and hide various elements. Or use
the JS console to disable the dynamic Monte Carlo length.

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sounds
"It was made to aid in discussions about missile development, since the
technical nature of honest-to-god 'rocket science' can make it rather
impenetrable from the perspective of laymen, yet many of the fundamental
questions are key to local understanding of geopolitical questions (e.g.,
'could North Korea hit my city with their latest missile?')."

And in case you're curious, here are the latest figures I could dig up on N.
Korea's launch capabilities. Caveat emptor!

Range: 10,000 km (Hwasong-14 aka KN-20 test successes indicate >6690km range,
though the missile appears to break up on reentry)

Circular Error Probable: ? Poor. Could not hit a city, especially since it
breaks up before hitting the target. The fine article says 2 km is what early
Chinese ICBMs could achieve, so it makes sense as a starting point.

Yield: 7-8 kilotons according to seismic estimates.

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forapurpose
> Circular Error Probable: ? Poor.

In a paper from a defense think tank, I read that when nuclear weapons were
developed, at least one major tactical reason was that the accuracy of all
munitions at the time was similarly poor (long before modern precision
weapons); remember it could take waves of bombers and hundreds of bombs to
destroy one building in WWII. The blast radius of nuclear weapons was a
solution to that problem.

They also said that precision weapons could, in that way, replace nuclear
weapons. If your weapon is accurate enough to hit a building reliably, you
need a much smaller blast radius, and destroying the entire city doesn't have
a military benefit. For awhile, and maybe still, the U.S. was considering a
system called Prompt Global Strike with that application in mind.

~~~
mikeash
I don't think precision weapons could entirely replace nuclear weapons. They
could to a degree, but if you want to destroy, say, _every_ enemy military
base simultaneously, the number of conventional precision weapons needed for
that would be cost prohibitive.

Accuracy is also a reason why nuclear weapons got bigger and bigger up to the
1960s or so, then began to shrink. It's also why the Soviets tended to have
larger ones than the Americans. If your bombers or ICBMs are only accurate to
within a couple of miles, then you need a _big_ bomb to reliably destroy your
target. If they're accurate to within a couple hundred feet, you can use a
much smaller bomb.

Prompt global strike is still being worked on, but I don't think they have it
figured out yet. It would be relatively easy to stick a conventional bomb on
an ICBM and do it that way, but the enemy couldn't distinguish that from a
nuclear launch, so there are fears of false alarms.

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forapurpose
> if you want to destroy, say, every enemy military base simultaneously, the
> number of conventional precision weapons needed for that would be cost
> prohibitive

For the U.S. and similarly wealthy militaries, the math doesn't seem to
support that statement. You don't need to destroy every base, just enough to
effectively eliminate the enemy's military capability. Let's say that's even
10,000 targets - that's not a lot of munitions for a war. At $2 million a pop
- rounding up Wikipedia's price for a high-end cruise missile - that's $20
billion, a pittance in war. The Iraq War, not a major one, cost over $1
trillion AFAIK (up to the first pullout, that is; it's not over yet).

For poor countries, who lack international networks for targeting and
communication in addition to the munitions and launch systems, I think the
statement holds up. It's also cost-effective for another reason: 1 nuke aimed
at Seoul or Tokyo or LA is enough to deter attackers in almost any situation.

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mikeash
10,000 conventional targets doesn't seem anywhere close to enough to destroy
the military capacity of a superpower.

Look at the US's cruise missile attack on that Syrian airbase a few months
back. That was something like 50 missiles and the base was back in service in
a day.

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forapurpose
> Look at the US's cruise missile attack on that Syrian airbase a few months
> back. That was something like 50 missiles and the base was back in service
> in a day.

Excellent point.

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r3bl
Any idea what's that thing in North-West Algeria that's on the map by default?

Seems like the only launch site that you can see on the map by default, which
doesn't make a lot of sense since Algeria is a non-nuclear weapon state. Quick
searching around tells me no other country stores nukes there neither.

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LeifCarrotson
It's precisely 35 degrees North latitude and 0 degrees longitude. There's
nothing actually there.

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SoMisanthrope
Has anyone watched the live entry of the US mirv's launched from one of our
subs to the range of 4k miles? The warheads enter and hit the intended targets
within 100m. US ICBMs eliminate guidance error using multiple methods, some of
which require no outside signals. They are wicked accurate, without GPS or
ground signals. I assume the Russians have the same. Ergo we are all fukered

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justadeveloper2
It bugs me that engineers spent countless hours perfecting these killing
machines and yet we still don't have a cure for most forms of cancer. It's
ludicrous.

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adrianN
If you take the engineers building rockets and ask them to cure cancer instead
we probably still wouldn't get a cure for cancer.

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rootw0rm
Shall we play a game?

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wiz21c
Tic Tac Toe ? :-)

