On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 10:41:16 -0500, (Peter
Stickney) wrote:

Sure, it's possible that you can take out a CVBG with a shotgun nuke
approach, but it would take the UK 35% of it's missiles and 80% of
it's warheads to be reasonably sure of success.

It's worse than that, form the U.K.

I pretty much had it covered, your numbers aren't so different from
mine.

Nukes a CVBG standpoint.
The Brits have 58 Trident D5s, (Which are stored and maintained in the
U.S., but that's beside the point) and less than 200 warheads. That
means that each missile's going to have 3 warheads, and you can't get
all of your boats to sea.

Nothing is stopping them from putting 8 warheads in each of the 16
missiles the Vanguard carries. They could launch 192 warheads from
one boat. General practice is to put 3 in each missile but nothing is
stopping them from changing it, or just surging all 4 boats.

Now, just going from the declassified stuff from Crossroads Able, and
applying the known scaling laws, you'd have to place a 100 KT warhead
within 8,000-9,000' of a ship in order to have a reasonable chance of
putting it out of action.

I was being generous and using 16,000' and taking off about 1/3 for
the structural improvements the US has added to it's ship designs
based on data from tests like Crossroads - calling it 1.8nm as a nice
round figure - 10,800'

area. So, in order to cover that 490 sq NM with the density required,
to ensure major damage, and not outright sinking, you'd need 70
warheads. That's 23 UK Trident's worth.

There is a slight overlap problem to deal with as the explosions
aren't exactly square, but that's a trivial matter for the purposes of
the example.

And we don't have 1 CVBG,
we've got what, 12? With roughly 8 at sea at any givin time.
So if a U.K./French sized power were to try something like that, what
they'd accomplish is the complete expenditure of their strategic
forces in order to completely **** off somebody with the ways & means
to pull a Carthage on them. (Not that we'd do that)

You never know, killing 7,000+ US servicemen by firing nearly 200
nukes at them is going to really **** the public off. It's not like
anyone can claim it was an accident.

One side effect of this example is why the ballistic submarine
component of the triad was so important, even if we waited for all the
nukes to land, it would be impossible for Russia to get all of our
ballistic missile subs even if they fired their entire arsenal into
the ocean.

One interesting games theory aspect of this is that it wouldn't do
to run at full speed for the entire 30 minutes. If the enemy knew you
would do that, they would just fire along a ring around the current
location of the BG at the max distance it can travel in that 30 mins,
saving themselves quite a few warheads and missiles.

--
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft